CALIFORNIA 
ADDRESSES 






BY 



PRESIDENT 
ROOSEVELT 




Class. 
Book- 



f-^ 



Ui___ 



CALIFORNIA 
ADDRESSES 

By PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 




SAN FRANCISCO: 
THE CALIFORNIA PROMOTION COMMITTEE 

19 3 



(^1 



-v 




The Tomoye Press 
San Francisco 

' P.I . . 



'^ 



DEDICATION 

THAT THOSE WHO LIVE IN 
CALIFORNIA MAY APPRECIATE 
THEIR STATE THE MORE— THAT 
THOSE WHO LIVE ELSEWHERE 
MAY KNOW ITS FUTURE AND ITS 
PRESENT — THAT ALL MAY BE 
INSPIRED BY THE PATRIOT- 
ISM OF THESE PAGES, 
THIS VOLUME IS 
PUBLISHED. 



$ 



IT IS A SOURCE OF GREAT GRATIFI- 
CATION TO THE CALIFORNIA PROMOTION 
COMMITTEE TO BE ABLE TO PRESENT 
IN PERMANENT AND AUTHENTIC FORM 
♦♦CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES BY PRESIDENT 
ROOSEVELT." THE ADRESSES HEREWITH 
PUBLISHED ARE GIVEN IN FULL, AND NO AD- 
DRESS, IT IS BELIEVED, HAS BEEN OMITTED. 
THE COMMITTEE DESIRES TO THANK ALL 
THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED 
REPRESENTATIVE ILLUS- 
TRATIONS HEREWITH 
REPRODUCED. 



¥ 



CONTENTS 

Remarks at Barstow, California, May 7, 190J .... 

Remarks at Victorville, California, May 7, 190J ..... 

Address at Redlands, California, May 7, 1903 - - . . 

Remarks to the School Children, San Bernardino, California, May 7, 1903 . 

Address at San Bernardino, California, May 7, 190J 

Address at Riverside, Califoniia, May 7, 190J - - . . . 

Address at Claremont, California ( Pomona College), May 8, 190J - 

Address at Pasadena, California, May 8, 190J - - - . 

Remarks at Los Angeles, California, May 8, 190J - . . . 

Remarks at Oxnard, California, May 9, 190J - - . . . 

Address at Ventura, California, May 9, 190J - - . - . 

Address at Santa Barbara, California, May 9, 1903 .... j5 

Remarks to the Forest Rangers at Santa Barbara, California, May 9, 190J 43 

Remarks at Surf, California, May 9, 190J ...... ^ 

Address at San Luis Obispo, California, May 9, 190J - . . - 45 

Remarks at Paso Robles, California, May 9, 1903 .... 48 

Remarks at Pajaro, California, May II, 1903 . . . . - 50 

Remarks at Watsonville, California, May II, 1903 .... 51 

Address at Santa Cruz, California, May II, 1903 - - . - - S3 

Remarks at the Big Tree Grove, Santa Cruz, California, May II, 1903 - 55 

Address at San Jose, California, May II, 1903 . . . . - 57 

Remarks at Campbell, California, May 11, 1903 - - . . . 62 

Remarks at Leland Stanford Junior University, Palo Alto, California, May 12, 1903 63 
Remarks at Burlingame, California, May 12. 1903 .... 74 

Address at the Dedication of the Building of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation, San Francisco, California, May 12, 1903 . . - - 75 
Address at Banauet Tendered by the Citizens of San Francisco, California, at 

Palace Hotel, May 12, 1903 ....... y^ 

Address at the Hall of the Native Sons of the Golden West, San Francisco, 
California, in Response to Greetings from the Association of Pioneers, 
Mexican War Veterans, Native Sons of the Golden West, and Native 
Daughters of the Golden West, May 13, 1903 . - - . - 84 

Address at the Ceremonies, Incident to the Breaking of Sod for the Erection of 
a Monument in Memory of the Late President McKinley, at San Francisco, 
California, May 13, 1903 ----.... 88 

Remarks on Being Presented with a Canteen by Various Organizations of the 

Spanish War Veterans, at San Francisco, California, May 13, 1903 - - 9a 

Address at Mechanics' Pavilion, San Francisco, California, May 13, 1903 . 94 

Address at Dedication of Navy Memorial Monument, San Francisco, Cali. 

fornia, May 14, 1903 .-.-..._. loz 
Address at the University of California, Berkeley, California, May 14, 1905 - 105 

Address at Oakland, California, May 14, 1903 ..... nx 

Remarks to the Service Men of the Spanish War, Who Acted as His Escort at 

Oakland, California, May 14, 1903 - . - - . - 114 

Remarks to the Veterans Who Escorted Him to the Dock at Oakland, Calf. 

fornia, May 14, 1903 ......... 115 



Address at the Laying of the Comer-stone of the Y. M.C. A. Auxiliary Club- 
house, Vallejo, Califomia, May 14, 190J .. ... 116 

Address at the Banquet Tendered Him by the Union League Club of San 

Francisco, Califomia, May 14, 1903 - - - - - - 119 

Remarks at Raymond, California, May 15, 1903 - - - - . 124 

Remarks at Berenda, Califomia, May 18, 190J - - - - - ii6 

Remarks at Merced, Califomia, May 18, 190J - . - . . 118 

Remarks at Modesto, Califomia, May 18, 1903 - - - - - 1*9 

Remarks at Truckee, California, May 19, 1903 ..... ijo 

Remarks at Colfax.iCalifomia, May 19, 1903 - - - - . -IJ4 

Remarks at Aubum, California, May 19, 1903 - - . - - IJ5 

Remarks at the Park, Sacramento, California, May 19, 1903 - - - 136 
Remarks to the Sacramento Society of Califomia Pioneers, Sacramento, Cali- 
fomia, May 19, 1903 ----.-..138 

Address at the Capitol Building, Sacramento, Califomia, May 19, 1903 . - iJ9 

Remarks at Redding, California, May zo, 1903 - . - - . 144 

Remarks at Dunsmuir, California, May ao, 1903 ..... 146 

Remarks at Sisson, California, May 20, 1903 ..... 150 

Remarks at Montague, California, May io, 1903 - . - - - 151 

Remarks at Hombrook, Califomia, May 10, 1903 .... 153 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Driving Through Smiley Heights at Redlands, California, May 7, 190J, Facing Page i 
At Redlands --------- "4 

Replanting Original Navel Orange Tree, Riverside, May 7, 190J - •• la 

Addressing the People, Pasadena, May 8, 190J - - - - - " zo • 

Arrival at Reviewing Stand, Before City Hall, Los Angeles, May 8, 190J " 28 -^ 

At Santa Barbara, May 9, 1903 - - - - - - - ** 36 r^ 

Mission Santa Barbara, " Portal of the Three Skulls," May 9, 190} - " 44 • 

Under the Big Trees, May II, 190J - - - - - - '* 54 ^ 

Greeting the Crowds, Comer Third, Kearny and Market Streets, San Fran- 
cisco, May 12, 1903 - - - - - - - " 58 ^ 

Parade, Market Street, San Francisco, May 12, 1903 - - - - " 80*^ 

Addressing the People from High School Platform, Oakland, May 14, 1903 " 96 

Reviewing U. S. Troops, Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, May 12, 1903 " 84 , 
Shaking Hands with Representative of the Spanish War Veterans, at Con- 
clusion of Presentation of Souvenir Canteen. Site, McKinley Monument, , 

Golden Gate Park, May 13, 1903 - - - - - - " 92 ./ 

Entering Union Square, San Francisco, May 14, 1903, Prior to Address Dedi- 
cating Monument Commemorating Victory, Manila Bay - - " 102 ^ 
Dedicating Monument, Union Square, May 14, 1903, Erected by the Citizens 
of San Francisco, to Commemorate the Victory of the American Navy 
at Manila Bay, May i, 1898 - - - - - - " 106 v 

Boarding the Torpedo Boat Destroyer " Paul Jones," Oakland Harbor, 

en route to U. S. Navy Yard, Mare Island, May 14, 1903 - - " 112 ' 

At Dunsmuir, May 20, 1903 - - - - - - - "128 

Laying Comer-stone Marine Hospital, Vallejo, May 14, 1903 - - " 132 

In Yosemite ------... •« 140 y 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S ITINERARY 
IN CALIFORNIA 



Thursday, May Seventh 
Barstow, 8:40 to 8:jo a. m. 
Redlands, 12:00 noon to j:oo p. m. 
San Bernardino, 3:40 to 5:40 p. m. 
Riverside, 6:00 to 6:05 p. m. 
Casa Blanca, 6:15 p, m. 

Friday, May Eighth 

Riverside, 8:00 a. m. 
Claremont, 9:00 to 9:jo a. m. 
Pasadena, io:jo a. m. to i2:jo p. m. 
Los Angeles, 1:00 p. m. 

Saturday, May Ninth 

Left Los Angeles, 6:00 a. m. 
Ventura, 9:00 to 10:00 a. m. 
Santa Barbara, 11:00 a. m. to 2:00 p. 
Paso Robles en route, 
San Luis Obispo, 5: Jo to 6:}o p. m. 

Sunday, May Tenth 
Del Monte, 12:01 a.m. 

Monday, May Eleventh 

Left Del Monte, 8:00 a. m. 
Pajaro, 8:50 to 9:00 a. m. 
Santa Cruz, 9:55 a. m. to 12:50 p. m. 
San Jose, 3:1 J p.m. 



Tuesday, May Twelfth 

Left San Jose. 8:}o a. m. 

Palo Alto, 9:00 a. m. to 12:00 noon. 

Burlingame, 12:25 to 1:25 p. m. 

San Francisco, 2:15 p.m. In San 
Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Val- 
lejo and Mare Island Navy Yard, 
until midnight, Thursday, May 
Fourteenth. 



Friday, May Fifteenth to 
Monday, May Eighteenth 
Yosemite Valley. 

Tuesday, May Nineteenth 

Reno, 7:30 to 7:40 a.m. 
Carson, 8:55 to 9:55 a. m. 
Reno, 11:10 a. m. to 12:10 p. m. 
Sacramento, 6:45 p. m. 

Wednesday, May Twentieth 

Left Sacramento, 12:30 a, m. 
Redding, 8:30 to 8:40 a, m. 
Dunsmuir en route. 
Sisson, 1:15 to 1:20 p. m. 
Montague en route. 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 
BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 190J 

My Fellow-Citizens: 

This is the first time I have ever been to California, and I 
cannot say to you how much I have looked forward to making 
the trip. I can tell you now with absolute certainty that I will 
have enjoyed it to the full when I get through. 

I have felt that the events of the last five or six years have been 
steadily hastening the day when the Pacific will loom in the 
world's commerce as the Atlantic now looms, and I have wished 
greatly to see these marvelous communities growing up on the 
Pacific Slope. There are plenty of things that to you seem mat- 
ters of course, that I have read about and know about from 
reading, and yet when I see them they strike me as very wonder- 
ful—the way the railroads have been thrust across the deserts 
until now we come to the border of that wonderful flower land,' 
the wonderful land of your State. 

One thing that strikes me more than anything else as I go 
through the country— as I said I have never been on the Pacific 
Slope; the Rocky Mountain States and the States of the great 
plains I know quite as well as I know the Eastern seaboard; I 
have worked with the men, played with them, fought with them ; 
I know them all through— the thing that strikes me most as I 
go through this country and meet the men and women of the 
country, is the essential unity of all Americans. Down at bottom 
we are the same people all tlirough. (Applause.) That is not 
merely a unity of section, it is a unity of class. For my good 
fortune I have been thrown into intimate relationship, into 
Ultimate personal friendship, with many men of many different 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



occupations, and my faith is firm that we shall come unscathed 
out of all our difficulties here in America, because I think that 
the average American is a decent fellow, and that the prime 
thing in getting him to get on well with the other average Amer- 
ican is to have each remember that the other is a decent fellow, 
and try to look at the problems a little from the other's standpoint. 
(Applause.) 

I am speaking here to the men who have done their part in the 
tremendous development of this country, — railroad men, the 
ranchers, the people who have built up this country. Something 
can be done by law to help in such development, something can 
be done by the administration of the law; but in the last analysis 
we have to rely upon the average citizenship of the country to 
work out the salvation of the nation. (Applause.) Back of the 
law stands the man; just exactly as in battle it is the man behind 
the gun that counts most, even more than the gun. (Applause.) 
So it is the man and woman, it is the average type of manhood 
and womanhood, that makes the State great in the end. In the 
individual nothing can take the place of his own qualities ; in the 
community nothing can take the place of the qualities of the 
average citizen. The law can do something, but the law never 
yet made a fool wise or a coward brave or a weakling strong. 
The law can endeavor to secure a fair show for every man so far 
as it is in the wit of man to secure such a fair show, but it must 
then remain for the man himself to show the stuff there is in 
him; and if the stuff is not in him, you cannot get it out of him, 
(Applause.) 

I believe in the future of this country because I believe in the 
men and women whom we are developing in the country. I am 
more glad than I can say for being in California. I thank you for 
coming out here to greet me. I wish you well with all my heart 
for the future. (Cheers and applause.) 



[*] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
VICTORVILLE, CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 1903 

My Fellow - Citizen s : 

I want to say what a pleasure it is to see you. I am enjoying 
so much coming into California. I have looked forward toward 
visiting your wonderful and beautiful State for years, and I am 
so glad of having the chance of being here. I welcome you all. 
I am glad to see the men, the women, and especially the children, 
for I believe in your stock and I am glad it is being kept up. 
(Cheers and applause.) 



[3] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
REDLANDS, CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 1903 

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, and You, My Fel- 
low-Americans, Men and Women of California: 

I am glad indeed to have the chance to visit this wonderful and 
beautiful State. And yet, first, let me tell you, my fellow-citizens, 
I did not need to come here to be one of you and devoted to your 
interests. I know California. I know what her sons and daugh- 
ters are and what they have done, for if I did not I would augur 
myself but a poor American. Rarely have I enjoyed a day more 
than this. I waked up coming through the Mojave Desert, and 
all that desert needs is water, and I believe you are going to get 
it. Then we came down into this wonderful garden spot, and 
though I had been told all about it, told about the fruits and the 
flowers, told of the wonderful fertility and thought I knew about 
it, it was not possible in advance to realize all the fertility, all 
the beauty, that I was to see. Indeed I congratulate myself on 
having had the chance to visit you. (Applause.) 

Coming today over the mountain range, coming down here, 
seeing what you have done, makes me realize more and more how 
much this v/hole country should lay stress on what can be done 
by the wise use of water, and, therefore, the wise use of the 
forests on the mountains. (Applause.) When I come to Cali- 
fornia I can sit at the feet of Gamaliel and learn about forestry 
and water. I do not have to preach it. All I can do is to ask 
you to go ahead and follow your own best practice. The people 
of our country have grown to realize and are more and more in 
practice showing that they realize how indispensable it is to pre- 
serve the great forests on the mountains and to use aright the 
water supply that those forests conserve. This whole country 

[4] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



here in Southern California shows what can be done by irriga- 
tion, what can be done by settlers foresighted enough to use the 
resources in such way as to perpetuate and better, not exhaust, 
them. We have passed the time when we could afford to let 
any man skin the country and leave it. (Applause.) Forestry, 
irrigation, all the efforts of the nation and the State governments, 
all the efforts of individuals and of local associations are to be 
bent to the object of building up the interests of the home-maker. 
The man we want to favor is the man who comes to live, and 
whose interest it is that his children and his children's children 
shall enjoy to an even greater degree what he has enjoyed him- 
self. He is the man whom we must encourage in every possible 
way; and it is because he is awake to his true interests that the 
marvelous progress has been made, largely through forestry, 
largely through irrigation, here in California and elsewhere in 
the mighty Western land which forms the major half of this 
republic. (Applause.) I think our citizens are more and jnore 
realizing that they wish to perpetuate the things that are of use 
and also the things that are of beauty. You in California are 
preserving your great natural scenery, your great objects of 
nature, your valleys, your giant trees. You are preserving them 
because you realize that beauty has its place as well as use, 
because you wish to make of this State even more than it now is 
the garden spot of the continent, the garden spot of the world. 
(Applause.) Here in Southern California I wish to congratulate 
you upon the way in which your citizens have built up these new 
cities, of which I speak in well nigh the newest. These new cities 
and this new country in fashion illustrate the efforts of the 
pioneer, of the early settler, of the man who first turns to account 
virgin soil, and yet have been fortunate enough to escape the 
roughness, the rawness, that too often necessarily accompanies 
such early settlement. Already in what you have done, you people 
of this new land, you have been fortunate to set examples which it 
would be well for the cities and the country districts of older 
lands to follow. (Applause.) Because, fundamentally, men and 

[5] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



women whom I am addressing, we must remember that much 
though climate and soil can do, it is man himself who does most. 
I congratulate you upon your astounding material prosperity. I 
congratulate you upon your fruit farms, your orchards, your 
ranches, upon your cities, upon your industrial and agricultural 
development, but above all I congratulate you on the quality of 
your citizenship. (Applause.) I am glad to meet you and to be 
greeted by you. I know the rest of you will not grudge my 
saying that among all of you who have greeted me, I prize most 
the presence of the men who fought in the great war. (Ap- 
plause.) Two years ago you came here to welcome your comrade, 
my chief and predecessor in office, President McKinley. (Ap- 
plause.) He had fought in the war in which you fought. He had 
done his part in the work that you did, the work which, if left 
undone, would have meant that today we had neither country nor 
President. (Applause.) Now we of the younger generation are 
bound in honor and in good faith to carry on the work that he 
and you did in war, the work that he did in peace. 

The lessons you taught were not lessons of war only, they 
are lessons to be applied in peace just as much. In the war it 
was necessary to have training; it was necessary to have arms, 
but the thing that was fundamental was to have men. (Ap- 
plause.) And you won because you had in you the quality which 
drove you forward to victory. You won because in the iron times 
you showed that you could recognize each man for his naked 
worth as a man. (Applause.) You fought for liberty under the 
law, through the law — not license — not any spirit that rises above 
the law ; the self-governing liberty of self-governing, self-restrain- 
ing freemen who know that anarchic violence, that disorder of 
any kind, is the hand-maiden of tyranny, the foe of freedom. (Ap- 
plause.) 

I greet you first, you on whose conduct we must model ours, 
and next I greet the future. I am very glad, my fellow-citizens, 
that you do so well with fruits, crops, and all of that, but I am 
even more pleased that you do as well with children. (Ap- 

[6] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



plause.) lb the children I have got but one word to say, and 
that applies just as well to the grown-up people, too. I believe in 
play and I believe in work. Play hard while you play, and when 
you work do not play at all. (Applause.) That is common sense 
for all of us. 

I wish to express my thanks to the men of the National Guard, 
some of whom wear medals which show that they fought in the 
same war in which I did. (Applause.) Ours was a little war, 
but we hope that we showed the desire at least not to fall too far 
short of the standard set by you of the great war. (Applause.) 
I must thank especially the gentleman in the not unfamiliar 
uniform whom I see before me. (Cheers and applause.) 

Now just one word in closing. Do you know what strikes me 
most as I meet you, the people of Southern California, represent- 
ing a community which has drawn its numbers from all the civil- 
ized peoples of the globe, from all the States of the Union? 
What strikes me most is that good Americans are good Amer- 
icans from one end of the Union to the other. (Applause.) I 
come to speak to you, and I appeal to you for the same ideals 
and in the name of the same great principles and the same great 
men who illustrate those principles as I should speak on the 
Atlantic seaboard. You, the men of the West, the men pre- 
eminently American, the men and women who illustrate in their 
lives exactly those characteristics which we are proudest to con- 
sider as typical of our country, I greet you because I am at 
home with you. (Applause.) Because there is no longer any 
need of saying that the worst American, the genuine traitor to 
the country, is the man who would inflame either section against 
section, or class against class. (Cries of "Good!" Applause.) 

Good laws can do much. Good administration of the laws can 
do much. We must have both. (Applause.) Law and the 
honest enforcement and administration of the law can do much, 
but most of all must be done by the man himself. Nothing can 
take the place of the exercise of the man's own individual quali- 
ties. Just exactly as in battle it is the man behind the gun 

[7] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



who counts most, and just exactly as it is true that the change in 
tactics does not mean any change in the fundamental qualities 
necessary to make the soldier, so it is true of good citizenship. 
You and I, you who went to the Philippines, we who fought in 
the smaller war, we had a small caliber, high-power gun if we 
were lucky. You did not have it at first in the Philippines, I 
understand. We had new weapons, we had new tactics, but we 
did well exactly in proportion as we had the spirit that made you 
do well from '6i to '65. (Applause.) Weapons change and 
tactics change, but the same kind of men who did well in Caesar's 
tenth legion would have done well following Grant or Lee in the 
days before Appomattox. No weapon, no system of tactics, could 
take the place of the fighting edge in the man, of the courage, 
resolution, power of individual initiative, readiness to obey and to 
obey on the instant, power to act by one's self and yet to act in 
combination with one's fellows. So now it is in citizenship. 
Something can be done by law, but no law that the wit of man 
can devise can make out of a man who has not got the spirit of 
decency and clean living in him a decent man. (Applause.) No 
law that the wit of man can devise will ever make the weakling, 
the man who does not know how to handle himself, able to hold 
his own in competition with his fellows. Law can and must 
secure justice, justice alike to the rich and to the poor, to the 
man in the country, and the man in the town, to prevent any one 
from wronging his fellows, and to safeguard him against wrong 
in return, but after the law has done that it yet remains true, 
as it will remain true in the future, as it has remained true since 
history dawned, that the prime factor in working out any man's 
success must be the sum of that man's own individual qualities. 
(Applause.) We need strong bodies. More than that we need 
strong minds, and finally we need what counts for more than 
body, for more than mind — character — character, into which 
many elements enter, but three above all. In the first place, 
morality, decency, clean living, the faculty of treating fairly those 
round about, the qualities that make a man a decent husband, a 

[8] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



decent father, a good neighbor, a good man to deal with or to 
work beside; the quality that makes a man a good citizen of the 
State, careful to wrong no one; we need that first as the founda- 
tion, and if we have not got that no amount of strength or 
courage or ability can take its place. No matter how able a man 
is, how good a soldier naturally, if the man were a traitor then 
the abler he was the more dangerous he was to the regiment, to 
the army, to the nation. It is so in business, in politics, in every 
relation of life. The abler a man is, if he is a corrupt politician, 
an unscrupulous business man, a demagogic agitator who seeks 
to set one portion of his fellow men against the other, his ability 
makes him but by so much more a curse to the community at large. 
In character we must have virtue, morality, decency, square deal- 
ing as the foundation; and it is not enough. It is only the 
foundation. In war you needed to have the man decent, patriotic, 
but no matter how patriotic he was if he ran away he was no 
good. So it is in citizenship ; the virtue that stays at home in its 
own parlor and bemoans the wickedness of the outside world is 
of scant use to the community. (Applause.) We are a vigorous 
masterful people, and the man who is to do good work in our 
country must not only be a good man, but also emphatically a 
man. We must have the qualities of courage, of hardihood, of 
power to hold one's own in the hurly-burly of actual life. We 
must have the manhood that shows on fought fields and that 
shows in the work of the business world and in the struggles of 
civic life. We must have manliness, courage, strength, resolution, 
joined to decency and morality, or we shall make but poor work 
of it. Finally those two qualities by themselves are not enough. 
In addition to decency, and courage, we must have the saving 
grace of common sense. We all of us have known decent and 
valiant fools who have meant so well that it made it all the more 
pathetic that the effect of their actions was so ill. 

Men and women of California, I believe in you, I believe in 
your future, because I think that the average citizenship of this 
State has in it just exactly the qualities of which I have spoken. 

[9] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



I believe in the future of this nation because I think that the 
average citizenship of the nation also is based on those three 
qualities, the quality of decency, the quality of courage, and the 
saving grace of common sense. I greet you today. I am glad 
to be here in your beautiful country. I am glad to see you, men 
and women of California. I wish you well and I firmly believe 
that your mighty future will make your past, great though your 
past is, seem small by comparison. (Cheers and applause.) 



[lo] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN 

SAN BERNARDINO, 

CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 1903 

Children : 

I wish to say how glad I am to see you. I wish to congratulate 
the men and women of this city upon the children. You seem to 
be all right in quality and in quantity. (Applause.) 

I wish to say a word of special acknowledgment to the 
teachers. There is no body of men and women in the country to 
whom more is owing than to that body of men and women upon 
whose efforts so much of the cleanliness and efficiency of our gov- 
ernment twenty years hence depends; because on their training 
largely depends the kind of citizenship of the next generation. 
There is no duty as important as the duty of taking care that the 
boys and girls are so trained as to make the highest type of men 
and women in the future. It is a duty that cannot be shirked 
by the home. The fathers and mothers must remember that it is 
the duty that comes before everything else after the getting of 
mere subsistence. The first duty after the duty of self-support is 
the training of the children as they should be trained. That 
comes upon the fathers and mothers. They cannot put it off 
entirely upon the teachers; but much depends upon the teachers 
also, and the fact that they have done and are doing their duty 
so well entitles them in a peculiar degree to the gratitude of all 
Americans who understand the prime needs of the republic. I am 
glad to see you, I believe in you, and I thank you. (Cheers and 
applause.) 



F"] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
SAN BERNARDINO, CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 1903 
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Governor, and You, My Fellow-Citizens: 

It gives me the utmost pleasure to be presented to those who 
are among the best on earth because they are Americans. (Ap- 
plause.) It is half a century since the early pioneers founded this 
place, and while time goes fast in America anywhere, it has gone 
fastest here on the Pacific Slope, and in the regions of the Rocky 
Mountains directly to the eastward. If you live in the presence 
of miracles you gradually get accustomed to them. (Applause.) 
So it is difficult for any of us, and it is especially difficult for 
those who have themselves been doing the things, to realize the 
absolute wonder of the things that have been done. California 
and the region round about have in the past fifty or sixty years 
traversed the distance that separates the founders of the civiliza- 
tion of Mesopotamia and Egypt from those who enjoy the civil- 
ization of today. They have gone further than that. They have 
seen this country change from a wilderness into one of the most 
highly civilized regions of the world's surface. They have seen 
cities, farms, ranches, railroads grow up and transform the very 
face of nature. The changes have been so stupendous that in our 
eyes they h^ve become commonplace. We fail to realize their 
immense, their tremendous importance. We fail entirely to 
realize what they mean. ' Only the older among you can remember 
the pioneer days, the early pioneer days, and yet today I have 
spoken to man after man yet in his prime who, when he first 
came to this country, warred against wild man and wild nature 
in the way in which that warfare was waged in the prehistoric 
days of the Old World. We have spanned in the single life— in 
less than the life of any man who reaches the age limit prescribed 
by the psalmist— in less than that time we have gone over the 

[la] 



r> 




BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



whole space from savagery to barbarism, to semi-civilization, to 
the civilization that stands two thousand years ahead of that of 
Rome and Greece in the days of their prime. (Applause.) 

The old pioneer days have gone, but if we are to prove our- 
selves worthy sons of our sires we cannot afford to let the old 
pioneer virtues lapse. There is just the same need now that there 
was in '49 for the qualities that marked a mighty and masterful 
people. East and West we now face substantially the same 
problems. No people can advance as far and as fast as we have 
advanced, no people can make such progress as we have made and 
expect to escape the penalties that go with such speed and prog- 
ress. The growth and complexity of our civilization, the intensity 
of the movement of modern life, have meant that with the benefits 
have come certain disadvantages and certain perils. A great 
industrial civilization cannot be built up without a certain dis- 
location and certain disarrangement of the old conditions, and 
therefore the springing up of new problems. The problems are 
new, but the qualities needed to solve them are as old as history 
itself, and we shall solve them aright only on condition that we 
bring to the solution the same qualities of head and heart that 
have been brought to the solution of similar problems by every 
race that has ever conquered for itself a space in the annals of 
time. It is not possible for any man to say exactly what a given 
community of our people is to do with a given problem at the 
moment, unless he is thoroughly familiar with all the conditions 
attendant thereon, but he can lay down certain general rules of 
conduct with the absolute certainty that our people have to pro- 
ceed in accordance with them, if they are to do aright their work 
in the State and the nation. 

Wherever I have been in the West I see men who wear the 
button which shows that in the times that tried men's souls they 
proved their truth by their endeavor; that they belonged to those 
who in the years from '61 to '65 dared all to see that the nation 
did not flinch from its destiny; and great though the praise is 
that is due to them, an even greater praise in my mind belongs to 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



the women of their generation who sent them out to battle, who 
stayed at home with the breadwinner absent, who had to suffer 
not only fear of the fate that might befall father, husband, son, 
lover or brother, but who had to get on as best they could in their 
own household without the help of the arm on which they had 
been accustomed to rely. (Applause.) You men and women of 
that time proved yourselves worthy to be freemen by displaying 
the old heroic qualities that had marked masterful men and 
womanly women from the days when the world began. You 
won because you showed the spirit that the men of '^6 showed 
under Washington, Wayne and Greene. You won by showing 
the traits of character that must be shown in any crisis by men 
who are to meet that crisis — perfectly ordinary traits. 

You do not win in a big fight by any patent device. There is 
not any way by which you can turn your hand and conquer in a 
time of great trial. You have got to conquer as your father and 
grandfather conquered before you. You have got to conquer as 
strong men have conquered in every struggle of history, and draw 
on whatever fund of courage, of resolution, of hardihood, of iron 
will that you have at your command, and you can conquer only 
if you draw on just those qualities. Another thing which you 
will remember very well, from '6i to '65, what my comrades here, 
the men who went into the great war and the men who went into 
the Spanish War or went to the Philippines will remember also, 
that there was a certain proportion of men who joined your 
ranks who for one reason or another fell by the wayside. There 
were different reasons — some for whom one simply felt an entirely 
respectful pity, who lacked the stamina to be able to stand the 
hard work, and it was mighty hard work. In the lesser war there 
was trouble that there was not in the big war, for there was not 
enough to go around. (Applause.) Among others the man 
would come around who wanted to be a hero right off, but did not 
want to do the other work of the moment. I recollect perfectly 
in my regiment, a young fellow joined, and on the second day he 
came to me and said : "Colonel, I came down here to fight for my 

[H] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



country, and they are treating me like a serf, and making me dig 
kitchen sinks." His Captain, who was a large man from New 
Mexico, explained to him that he would go right on and dig 
kitchen sinks ; that that was what his business was at the moment, 
and that if he dug them well we would see to the hero business 
later. The man who did well in the army in those days was, as 
a rule, the man who did not wait to do well until something big 
occurred, but who did his duty just as his duty came, during the 
long marches, during the weary months of waiting in camp, did 
his duty just exactly as in the battle. He was the man on whom 
you relied, whom you trusted, whom you wanted to have with 
you in your troop, as your bunky, whatever it was, he was the 
man you wanted around. It is just exactly the same with citizen- 
ship. It was just exactly the same in the pioneer days. The 
pioneers, men and women, faced much such difficulty as the men 
of the Grand Army, and for you, the men of that generation, and 
your wives, there was the same hardship, the same endurance of 
grinding toil, the same years of effort that too often seemed fruit- 
less, the same iron will, and the same ultimate triumph, and if 
we are to succeed we must show the same qualities that the men 
of the Grand Army showed, that the pioneers showed, that all 
men and all women have showed who were fit to be fathers and 
mothers in a vigorous State. I would plead with my countrymen 
to show not any special brilliancy, or special genius, but the 
ordinary humdrum commonplace qualities which in the aggregate 
spell success for the nation, and spell success for the individual. 
Remember that the chance to do the great heroic work may or 
may not come. If it does not come, then all that there can be 
to our credit is the faithful performance of every-day duty. That 
is all that most of us throughout our lives have the chance to do, 
and it is enough, because it is the beginning to do, because it 
means most for the nation when done, and if the time for the 
showing of heroism does come you may guarantee that those who 
show it are most likely to be the people who have done their duty 
in average times as the occasion for doing the duty arose. 

[■5] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



My friends, I am very glad to see you. I am very glad to 
be in California. Today is the first time I ever was in your 
wonderful and beautiful State. I do not know if this is a fair 
sample, but if it is California is certainly to be congratulated all 
through. (Applause.) In saying good-by I wish to express the 
pleasure it has given me to see you. I believe in the State ; I be- 
lieve in what the State produces, but I believe most of all in the 
men and women of the State. It is a good thing to have your soil 
and your climate, your great industrial possibilities ; it is a better 
thing to have the type of citizenship which California has pro- 
duced. (Applause.) I congratulate you; I congratulate the Amer- 
ican people, of whom you are part. I wish you well with all my 
heart, and I believe that your future will be infinitely greater even 
than the mighty present, even than your past has warranted us in 
believing. (Cheers and applause.) 



[i6] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT 
RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA 

May 7, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and You, My Fellow-Citizens: 

I have enjoyed to the full getting into your beautiful State. I 
had read about what I should expect here in Southern California, 
but I had formed no idea of the fertility of your soil, the beauty 
of your scenery, or the wonderful manner in which the full 
advantage of that soil had been taken by man. Here I am in the 
pioneer community of irrigated fruit growing in California. In 
many other parts of the country I have had to preach irrigation. 
Here you practice it (applause), and all I have to say here is that 
I earnestly wish that I could have many another community 
learn from you how you have handled your business. Not only 
has it been most useful, but it is astonishing to see how with the 
use you have combined beauty. You have made of this city 
and its surroundings a veritable little paradise. 

It has been delightful to see you. Today has been my first day 
in California. I need hardly say that I have enjoyed it to the 
full. I am glad to be welcomed by all of you, but most of all 
by the men of the Grand Army, and after them by my own com- 
rades of the National Guard, and I have been particularly pleased 
to pass between the rows of school children. I like your stock 
and I am glad it is not dying out. (Applause.) 

I shall not try this evening to do more than say to you a word 
of thanks for your greeting to me. I admire your country, but 
I admire most of all the men and women of the country. It is 
a good thing to grow citrus fruits, but it is even a better thing 
to have the right kind of citizenship. I think you have been able 
to combine the very extraordinary material prosperity with that 

[17] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



form of the higher life which must be built upon material pros- 
perity if it is to amount to what it should in the long run. 

I am glad to have seen you. I thank you for coming here to 
greet me. I wish you well at all times and in every way, and 
I bid you good luck and good night. (Cheers and applause.) 



[i8] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT 

CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA 

(POMONA COLLEGE) 

May 8, 190} 

Mr. President, Men and Women: 

Even in a distinctly college and school gathering I know you 
will not grudge my saying my first word of greeting to those 
whom before all others we honor for what they did, to those 
because of whom we have a country or a President or any method 
of moving forward along the path of greatness — the men of the 
Grand Army. (Cheers and applause.) I always envy you men 
of the Grand Army because you do not have to preach ; you prac- 
ticed. All we have got to do is to try to come up to the 
standard in peace which you set alike in war and in peace. 

It is a very good combination to have the red with the white 
and blue. You can see over there that Harvard, which is my 
college, has the red and then comes the blue and white of yours. 
It did me good to get into a circle of the higher education, and 
listening to you I thought at once of football. My friends and 
fellow-citizens, it is such a pleasure to be in this college town 
today. It is so wonderful a thing to look at the country through 
which I have come, to realize that the site of this college but a 
few years ago was exactly as the rest of the plain was, to realize 
that all of the cultivation that I see, all of the agricultural work 
that has been done, that has so completely changed the face of the 
country, has been done within this brief space of time; to see 
the two things together and realize that you people of California 
are laying broad and deep by your industry and intelligence the 
foundation of material prosperity, and that upon that foundation 
of material prosperity you are erecting the superstructure of 
intellectual, moral and spiritual well-being, without which the 

[^9] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



foundation would never be anything but a base with no building 
upon it. (Applause.) Of course, we have to have material 
prosperity as underlying our life. The first thing that the indi- 
vidual man has to do is to pull his own weight, to earn his own 
way, not to be a drag on the community. And the individual 
who wants to do a tremendous amount in life, but who will not 
start by earning his own way in life is not apt to be of much use 
in the world. He is akin to those admirable creatures who from 
'6i to '6s were willing to begin as brigadier generals. (Laughter 
and applause.) We must have first the desire to do well in the 
day of small things, the day through which all of us must pass, 
the day which lasts very long with most of us. We must have 
the desire and the power to do well industrially as a community, 
as individuals. Before we can do anything with the higher life, 
before we can have the higher thinking, there must be enough of 
material comfort to allow for at least plain living. We have got 
to have that first before we can do the high thinking; but if we 
are to count in the long run we must have built upon the material 
prosperity the power and desire to give to our lives other than a 
merely material side. It would be a poor thing for this State 
and for this country if, no matter how great our success in busi- 
ness, in agriculture, in all that pertains to the body, we had not 
provided for our children and those that come after us, to get 
what is good alike for the soul and the mind. The college and 
school, any institution of learning, has the two sides — I will say 
three sides, because now we all recognize the need of the healthy 
body. There is not much need of educating the body if one 
pursues certain occupations, but the minute that you come to 
people who pursue a sedentary life, there is a great need for 
educating the body. All of us recognize that, if we come to think 
of it. The man that is the ideal good citizen is the man who in 
the event of trial, in the event of a call from his country, can 
respond to that call as you responded in the great war. Then 
when that call is made you need not only fiery enthusiasm, but 
you need the body containing that fiery enthusiasm to be suf- 

[20] 



n 




BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ficiently hardy to bear it up, to bear it up on the march, to bear 
it up in the camp, to bear it into battle; you need a sound body, 
then you need a sound mind and a trained mind. Of course, 
there has got to be a capacity for intellectual development there 
to train, but it is a very great error, and an error into which in 
the past we as a nation have been prone to fall, to believe that 
you can trust to that intellectual capacity without training. You 
cannot. There are wholly exceptional people who will make the 
greatest success with insufficient training. We cannot judge by 
those wholly exceptional people. Every college should aim from 
its intellectual side, from the intellectual standpoint, to add to 
the sum of productive scholarship of the nation ; and I trust that 
this college, that all colleges like this, in these great new States 
will add to the purely American type of American scholarship. 
By purely American I do not mean that you should self-con- 
sciously strive in your scholarship to have little points of unim- 
portant difference. I mean that you should turn your attention 
to the thing that you find naturally at hand, or to which your 
minds naturally turn, and try in dealing with that to deal in so 
fresh a way that the net outcome shall be an addition to the 
world's stock of wisdom and knowledge. Every college should 
strive to bring to development among the students the capacity 
to do good original work. That is important. Even more 
important, however, than anything you can do for your intellect, 
or anything that can be done for the intellect in the schools, the 
children whom I see over there, is what can be done for that 
which counts for more than body, for more than mind, for 
character; that is what ultimately counts (applause), in shaping 
the fate of the nation, the destiny of the nation in great crises 
and in ordinary times. Brilliancy, genius, cleverness of all kinds, 
do not count for anything like as much as the sturdy traits that 
we group together under the name of character. (Applause.) 
In the Civil War it was a good thing to be clever, to be capable, 
but it was an infinitely better thing to have in you the spirit that 
declined to accept defeat, and that drove you forward to the ulti- 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



mate triumph. That was what counted. So in life what counts 
as the chief factor in the success of a man or a woman is charac- 
ter, and character is partly inborn and partly developed; partly 
developed by the man's individual will, the woman's individual 
will, partly developed by the wise training of those above the 
young man or young woman, the boy or the girl, partly devel- 
oped by the myriad associations of life, in just such an institution 
of learning as this. Character has two sides. It is composed 
of two sets of traits ; in the first place the set of traits which we 
group together under such names as clean living, decency, 
morality, virtue, the desire and power to deal fairly each by his 
neighbor, each by his friends, each toward the State ; that we have 
to have as fundamental. The abler, the more powerful any man 
is the worse he is if he has not got the root of righteousness in 
him. (Applause.) In any regiment the man who has no loyalty 
to his fellows, no spirit of devotion to the flag, no desire to see 
the regiment stand high, to do his duty and see his fellows rise 
with him, that man, no matter how brave, or how able, is a 
curse to the regiment, and the sooner you can get him out the 
better. So in civil life, the abler a man is in business, in politics, 
in social leadership, the worse he is if he is a scoundrel, whether 
his scoundrelism takes the form of corruption in business, cor- 
ruption in politics, or that most sinister of all forms, the effort 
to rise by inciting class hatred, by inciting lawlessness, by exciting 
the spirit of evil, the spirit of jealousy and envy as between man 
and man ; and that spirit is equally base, whether it take the 
form of arrogance on the part of the well-to-do toward those less 
well-to-do, or of mean and base envy and jealousy on the part of 
those not well-to-do for those who are better off. (Applause.) 
It is equally evil against the principles of our government in 
one case as in the other. And having those traits, we must have 
others in addition. The virtue that sits at home is of scant use 
in the world; the virtue that is very good in its own parlor and 
bemoans the wickedness of those outside does not do much for 
the benefit of mankind. In the war you had to have patriotism. 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



but there was but little to be made of the man who was patriotic 
but who had a tendency to run away. In addition to decency, 
morality, virtue, clean living, you must have hardihood, resolu- 
tion, courage, the power to do, the power to dare, the power to 
endure, and when you have that combination, then you get the 
proper type of American citizenship. I hail the chance of being 
met by such a gathering as this, because it is of good augury for 
the republic to see in this mighty Western State, this typically 
American State, the things of the body, and the things of the 
soul equally cared for. I greet you and I thank you. (Cheers 
and applause.) 



[*3j 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 

May 8, 190J 

Mr. Congressman, Mr. Mayor, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, 
Men, Women and Children of Pasadena: 

I am not going to talk to you very long this morning, because 
I am too much interested in your community. I want to see all 
I can see. We speak often of the old pioneer days, and the 
wonderful feats of our countrymen in those days, but we are 
living right in the middle of them now, only we are living under 
pleasanter auspices. To think of the well-nigh incredible fact 
that all of this that I have been looking at — the city, the develop- 
ment of the country — that it has all occurred within twenty years ; 
that twenty years has separated the sheep pasture from this 
city, from the fertile irrigated region round about. It is hard 
to believe it. You have done this great work of building up a 
new community; you have built up the new community, and yet 
have preserved all the charm, all the refinement, of the oldest 
civilizations. It is all so striking that it is difficult for me to 
know what to comment upon. Yesterday and today I have been 
traveling through what is literally a garden of the Lord, in sight 
of the majestic and wonderful scenery of the mountains, going 
over this plain tilled by the hand of man as you have tilled it, 
that has blossomed like the rose — blossomed as I never dreamed 
in my life that the rose could blossom until I came here. Every- 
where I have gone I have been greeted by the men who wear the 
button that shows that they belong to the Grand Army of the 
Republic, men who fought in that army in many different regi- 
ments, from many different States, who have come here from 
many different States; but who as they fought, all, no matter 
frorrt what State they came — as they fought all for the federal 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



flag and the federal Union have come here from their original 
home to become Californians while remaining Americans. For, 
oh, my friends, the thing that has impressed me most here in this 
State of the West, this wonderful commonwealth that has grown 
up on the Pacific Slope, the thing that has impressed me most is 
that I am speaking to Americans just as I speak in any other 
section of the country! We are all pretty much alike, and I 
believe so unqualifiedly in the future of the country because I 
believe in the average American, because I believe in the average 
standard of our citizenship; and I believe that serious though 
the problems are that now confront us, they will all be solved 
exactly as you solved the far more serious problems of the early 
*6o's, if we approach them in the same spirit in which you 
approached yours. You went to war for liberty, union, and the 
brotherhood of man, and now in peace it rests for us to stand 
for the indivisible nation, for liberty under and through the law, 
and for brotherhood in its widest, deepest and truest sense; the 
brotherhood which recognizes in each man a brother to be helped, 
which will not suffer wrong and will not inflict it. I wish to 
see the average American take in reference to his fellows the 
attitude that I wish to see America take among the nations of 
the world; the attitude of one who scorns equally to flinch from 
injustice by the strong and to do injustice to the weak. (Cheers 
and applause.) You fought for liberty under the law, not liberty 
in spite of the law. Any man who claims that there can be 
liberty in spite of and against the law is claiming that anarchy 
is liberty. (Applause.) From the beginning of time anarchy 
in all its forms has been the hand-maiden, the harbinger, of 
despotism and tyranny. We must remember ever that the surest 
way to overturn republican institutions, the surest way to do away 
with the essential democratic liberty that we enjoy, is to permit 
any one under any excuse to put the gratification of his passions 
over the law. The law, the supreme law of the land, must be 
obeyed by every man, rich or poor, alike. (Applause.) Ours is 
a government of equal rights under the law, guaranteeing those 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



rights to each man so long as he in his turn refrains from wrong- 
ing his brother. We cannot exist as a repubHc unless we are true 
to the fundamental principles of those who founded the republic 
in 'yd, and those who perpetuated it in the years from '6i to '65. 
And if we remain true to the philosophy preached and practiced 
by Washington and Lincoln we cannot go far wrong. (Ap- 
plause.) 

New problems come up all the time. The tremendous growth 
of our complex industrialism means that we have to face new 
conditions, that we enjoy new benefits, and must overcome new 
difficulties ; but the spirit in which we must face them must be 
the old spirit which has won victory in military strife and under 
civic conditions since the dim days when history dawned. We 
can win only if we show the principles that made you win. You 
did not win by any patent device. You did not win in that 
way. There is not any patent device for getting the millennium, 
and any man who says that by following him, that by invoking 
some specific remedy, all injustice, and all evil, and all suffering 
will be done away with misleads himself and you. Something 
can be done by law. Much can be done by honest and fearless 
administration of the law; but in the long run the prime factor 
in deciding each man's success must be the sum of the man's 
individual qualities. We must work in combination. We must 
work together; but we must remember that no man can do any- 
thing with others unless he can do something for himself. 

In the army you will remember that there was an occasional 
man whom nothing under heaven could have turned into a good 
soldier. (Laughter.) You could train him, arm him, drill him, 
but on the important day he fell sick. (Laughter.) If he stayed 
in action you had to watch him so narrowly for fear he got out 
that he simply distracted your attention from your legitimate 
business. You have got just the same type of man in civic life. 
And still each one of us must remember that any one may and 
will at times slip. There is not a man of us here who does not 
c.t times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then 

[26] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his 
brother. While we must remember that — remember that every 
man at times stumbles and must be helped up, if he lies down 
you cannot carry him. He has got to be willing to walk. You 
can help him in but one way, the only way in which any man 
can be helped permanently — help him to help himself. (Ap- 
plause.) 

We can solve aright all the difficult problems that come up 
because of and through our modern civilization, if we approach 
them in accordance with the immutable laws of righteousness 
and of common sense; if we treat each man on his worth as a 
man ; if we demand from him, be he rich or poor, obedience to 
the law and just dealing toward his fellows; if we demand it 
and are scrupulously careful in return to do the right we demand ; 
if we remember our duties just as keenly as we remember our 
rights. 

Glad though I am to see all of you, to see the grown-ups, I 
think I am even gladder to see the children. (Applause.) I was 
greeted by the high school in a way that made me feel perfectly 
certain that the nine and eleven had their parts in the curriculum. 
It is, of course, the merest truism to say that important though it 
is to develop factories, railroads, farms, commerce, the thing 
that counts is the development of citizenship; that the one thing 
that decides ultimately what the nation is, is the character of 
the average man or woman in the nation. That is what decides 
the future of the commonwealth ; and I am very glad to see the 
kind of children and to see how many there are. (Applause.) 
I like your stock and I am glad it is being kept up. (Applause.) 

I wish to say a special word of appreciation to those engaged 
in doing the most vitally necessary work in the community — 
the school teachers, all engaged in education. They are the 
people who are deciding, next only to the fathers and mothers 
themselves, what the future destiny of this country shall be. 
If we have the most marvelous material development that the 
world has ever seen, and yet if we train up the next generation 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



wrong, that material development will be as dust and ashes in the 
balance; it will count for nothing and less than nothing. It 
is indispensable as a foundation, and it is worthless unless there 
is a superstructure upon it. I believe in you. I believe in your 
future. I believe in our future. I believe in our people, in the 
American people from one side of the continent to the other, be- 
cause I believe that the fathers and mothers, the teachers of this 
generation, are bringing up the children, the boys and the girls, 
to be in the future such men and women as those who in the iron 
days of the Civil War left us a heritage of glory and honor for- 
ever. (Cheers and applause.) 



[78 J 



n 



n 




BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 

May 8, 1903 

My Fellow-Citizens : 

I greet you and thank you for the enjoyment you have given 
me today. I cannot say how I have appreciated being here in 
your beautiful State and your beautiful city. I do not remember 
ever seeing quite the parallel to the procession I have just 
witnessed. (Applause.) I find, men and women of California, 
that California believes implicitly in two of my own favorite 
beliefs — the navy and irrigation. (Applause.) The navy, because 
this country is one of the great leading nations of mankind and 
is bound to become ever greater as the years roll by, and there- 
fore it must have a navy corresponding to its position. (Ap- 
plause.) Moreover, we as a nation front two great oceans, and 
we must have a navy capable of asserting our position alike on 
the Pacific and the Atlantic. (Applause.) This year we have 
begun the preparations for the completion of the Isthmian Canal. 
(Applause.) That is important commercially; it will become 
even more important should we ever become involved in war, 
because holding that canal it would be open to our own warships 
and closed to those of any hostile power. (Applause.) I want 
a navy, I want to see the American republic with a fighting navy, 
because I never wish to see us take a position that we cannot 
maintain. I do not believe in a bluff. I feel about a nation as we 
all feel about a man; let him not say anything that he cannot 
make good, and having said it let him make it good. (Applause.) 
I believe in doing all we can to avoid a quarrel, to avoid trouble ; 
I believe in speaking courteously of all the other peoples of man- 
kind, of scrupulously refraining from wronging them and of 
seeing that in return they do not wrong us. (Applause.) I 

[^9] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



believe in the Monroe doctrine, and I believe in it not as an 
empty formula of words, but as something we are ready to make 
good by deeds, and therefore I believe in having an adequate 
navy with which to make that doctrine good. More than that, 
here on the Pacific, the greatest of the oceans, we as a nation are 
growing by leaps and by bounds, our interests increasing with ever 
accelerating rapidity, and if we are to protect those interests, 
and to take the position we should take, we must see that the 
growth of the navy takes place with equal rapidity with the 
growth of the interests that it is to protect. 

When I come to speak of the preservation of the forests, of 
the preservation of the waters, of the use of the waters from 
the mountains and of the waters obtained by artesian wells, I 
only have to appeal to your own knowledge, to your experience. 
I have been passing through a veritable garden of the earth 
yesterday and today, here in the southern half of California, and 
it has been made such by the honesty and wisdom of your peo- 
ple, and by the way in which you have preserved your waters and 
utilized them. I ask that you simply keep on as you have begun, 
and that you let the rest of the nation follow suit. We must 
preserve the forests to preserve the waters, which are themselves 
preserved by the forests, if we wish to make this country as a 
whole blossom as you have made this part of California blossom. 

In saying good-by to you I want to say that it has been the 
greatest pleasure to see you, and I am glad, my fellow-Americans, 
to think that you and I are citizens of the same country. (Cheers 
and applause.) 



[30] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT _ 

OXNARD, CALIFORNIA ^^ 

May 9, 190} 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I wish to say what a great pleasure it has been to be here 
today, and to see the tangible evidence of the extraordinary 
industry that has been started here within the last five years. It 
has been the greatest pleasure. I am not surprised at it, because 
the last two days in California have taught me not to be surprised 
at anything. And I am glad to see what has been done by your 
beet culture, fruit culture of every kind, irrigation, and tilling 
of the soil. (Applause.) 



[31] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
VENTURA, CALIFORNIA 

May 9, 190J 

Senator Bard, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, My Fellow- 
Americans : 

I have enjoyed to the full the time I have spent in your wonder- 
ful and beautiful State. Just now I have for the first time in my 
life seen the greatest of all the oceans. (Applause.) When I come 
here to California I am not in the West, I am west of the West. 
It is just California. And yet, oh, my fellow-countrymen, the 
thing after all that strikes me most is the fact that when I speak 
to you who dwell beside the Pacific, I, who have come from 
beside the Atlantic, am speaking to my own people, with the 
same thoughts and the same ideals. (Applause.) How could it 
be otherwise in a community where I am greeted first by the 
men of the Grand Army, by the men who, in the days that tried 
men's souls, so worked and so fought that today we have one 
country and one flag; and each of us here, each man and each 
woman, is walking with head erect because of citizenship in the 
proudest and greatest republic upon which the sun has ever 
shone? (Applause.) 

This is the third day that I have been traveling among the 
people who, as the Senator said, are primarily tillers of the soil, 
whose cities have been built up because of the abundant yield of 
the soil thus tilled, and I have had the experience that all of us 
have had who read about things in advance, and yet cannot quite 
realize them until they see them. I had known from hearsay and 
from books of the wonderful fertility, the wonderful beauty, of 
this semi-tropical climate and soil, but I had not realized all that 
it was until I saw it myself. I am now for the third day passinc? 
through a veritable little earthly paradise. I do not wonder that 

[3^] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



you look happy. I should be ashamed of you if you did not. I 
have been, of course, amazed at the yield of your soil, treated as 
it has been with such wisdom and industry by those who have 
tilled it, showing especially the amount that can be done by 
irrigation, the amount that can be done by a combination of 
scientific and practical agriculture, at your oranges, at the growth 
of the beet-sugar industries, at all your fruit products, at all your 
agricultural products. I have also been glad to see such good 
horses. 

I want to say a word of special greeting to my friends over 
yonder, of the school, who are on horseback. You know the 
old idea of education was to teach a boy to ride, shoot, and tell 
the truth. Now we want to teach him something besides that, 
but he wants to know those three things also. Of course, if he 
does not tell the truth then nothing can be done with him in any 
way or shape. You can pardon most anything in a man who 
will tell the truth, because you know where that man is ; you 
know what he means. If any one lies, if he has the habit of 
untruthfulness, you cannot deal with him, because there is noth- 
ing to depend on. You cannot tell what can be done with him or 
by his aid. Truth telling is a virtue upon which we should not 
only insist in the schools and at home, but in business and in 
politics just as much. (Applause.) The business man or politi- 
cian who does not tell the truth cheats ; and for the cheat we 
should have no use in any walk of life. (Applause.) 

I wish, Senator Bard, speaking from this building, to thank 
especially the teachers for what they have done. While, of 
course, each man and each woman must remember that no one can 
relieve them from their duties in educating their children, yet 
their work must be supplemented by that of the teachers ; and 
it must be work done not merely for the sake of the wage, but 
for the sake of doing the work, if the next generation is to be 
worthy of the generation that fought in the Civil War. (Ap- 
plause.) I wish to express always the debt of gratitude which 
all good citizens must feel that we owe to the men and women 

[33] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



who make their special work the training of the children. Our 
whole future, of course, depends primarily upon how the next 
generation turns out. All of the agricultural improvements, all 
of the cultivation of the soil, all of the building up of cities and 
railroads, all the growth of commerce, all the growth of manu- 
factures, will count for nothing if you have not got the right type 
of men and women in the future. It is upon that that ultimately 
the fate of the nation depends. 

I was greeted here by the pioneers, the men who first came 
here. They could come here, our people could come here, and 
conquer this continent only because of the individual worth of 
the average citizen, because the average pioneer had in him the 
quality which made him fit to do battle with, and to overcom.e, 
wild man and wild nature. We are here upon the foundations 
of an old colony which had been in existence well-nigh three 
quarters of a century before the people of our stock came to 
California. That old colony represented much for which we have 
to be grateful, and I am glad to see every effort made to cherish 
the memories of that time, to keep alive what was best in it, but 
at the same time we must remember the obvious truth that in 
the half century that followed the advent of the first people of 
our stock here, this country progressed a thousand-fold more 
rapidly than it had in the preceding three-quarters of a century. 
It thus progressed primarily because of the individual quality of 
the men who came into it. (Applause.) And it will progress 
in the future only on condition that we keep up to the highest 
standard that quality of individual citizenship; and that can be 
kept up only if the boys and girls of today are so trained that 
the men and women of the future shall come up to the highest 
standard demanded in American life. Trained in body? Of 
course I believe in that emphatically. I wish to see our people 
hardy, vigorous, strong, able to hold their own in whatever test 
may arise. I wish to see them able to work and able to play hard. 
I believe in play, and I like to see people play hard while they 
play, and when they work I do not want to see them play at all. 

[34] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



That is good sense for the younger people and good sense for 
the older people. If I had any word of advice (which is a 
very cheap commodity) to give to you I should say: Get all the 
enjoyment you legitimately can out of life, but remember that 
the only sure way of getting in the end no enjoyment out of life, 
is to start in to make it the end of your existence. The poorest 
life that any one can live from the standpoint of pleasure is the 
life that has nothing but pleasure as its end and aim. While I 
hope that as the chance occurs each man will get all the fun he 
can out of life, remember that when it comes not merely to look- 
ing back upon it, but to living it, the kind of life that is worth 
living is the kind of life that is embodied in duty worth doing 
which is well done. (Applause.) I want to see the children 
brought up with strong bodies. I wish them to have strong 
minds, and I wish them to have that which counts for more than 
body, for more than mind — character ; character, into which many 
elements enter, but above all, the three, of honesty, of courage 
and of common sense. (Cheers and applause.) 



[35] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA 

May 9, 190J 

Judge, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, Men and Women of 
Santa Barbara: 

It has been a great and singular pleasure to spend these three 
days in Southern California. I do not know that I ever before 
so thoroughly understood the phrase, "A garden of the Lord." 
That is what you are living in, and I do not wonder that you 
look happy and contented. I should think but ill of you if you 
were not. Today, for the first time in my life, I have seen the 
greatest of the oceans ; I have come across the continent from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific; from the East to the West, and now 
west of the West, into California. I am particularly glad to 
be greeted here at Santa Barbara, by the men who wear afloat 
the uniform of Uncle Sam. (Applause.) At every stop here 
in your State I am met by representatives of the Grand Army 
of the Republic, of the men to whom we owe it that because they 
showed their faith by their works when works meant blood and 
toil and effort well-nigh superhuman, because they did that, 
when I come here, I come to a people living under the same 
flag that floats from the gulf to the great lakes in the Eastern 
half of our land; it is because of what they did that there is a 
President to come here at all ; it is because of what they did 
that when I come here I see the men from the United States 
Navy ashore here in California; it is because of what they did 
that when the war came in 1898, the great warship Oregon 
steamed southward from California around the cape, up the 
Atlantic in time to take part in the decisive victory off Santiago 
Harbor. The fundamental lesson to learn from one end of this 
country to the other is the essential unity of our people; and I 

[36] 




At Santa P>auhaka, California, May 9, 1903. 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



speak here in a State which is what it now is because the 
pioneers who came here came with empire in their brains, came 
to pitch a new commonwealth by the side of the great ocean, 
as old world men pitched tents, because they were of a stock 
which dared to be great, and we in our time now must dare to 
be great. Our country looks eastward across the Atlantic and 
westward across the Pacific, across to that West which is the 
hoary East, from the Occident west to the Orient. (Applause.) 
I fail to see how any son of this country, worthy to be descended 
from the men of '6i to '65— the men who upheld the statesman- 
ship of Lincoln and who followed to victory Grant and Sherman 
and Thomas and Sheridan— I fail to see how any true son of 
theirs can in his turn fail to welcome with eager joy the chance 
to make this country greater even than it has been before. Of 
course we have great tasks before us. The man who has not 
got great tasks to do cannot achieve greatness. Greatness 
only comes because the task to be done is great. The men who 
lead lives of mere ease, of mere pleasure, the men who go through 
life seeking how to avoid trouble, to avoid risk, to avoid effort, 
to them it is not given to achieve greatness. Greatness comes 
only to those who seek not how to avoid obstacles, but how to 
overcome them. (Applause.) 

Here I speak in a region where there remain memorials of an 
older civilization than ours, of a civilization that was in Califor- 
nia three-quarters of a century before the first hardy people 
of the new stock crossed the desert, crossed the mountain chains, 
or came by ships up from the isthmus, and I want to congratulate 
you upon the way in which you are perpetuating the memorials 
of that elder civilization. It is a fine thing in a new community 
to try to keep alive the continuity of historic interests; it is a 
fine thing to try to remember the background which even those 
of us who are most confident of the future may be pleased to 
see existed in the past; and I am pleased to see how in your 
architecture, both in the architecture of new and great buildings 
going up, and in the architecture of the old buildings, and in 

[37] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



many other ways, you are, by keeping the touch and flavor of the 
older civilization, giving a peculiar flavor to our own new civ- 
ilization, and in an age when the tendency is a trifle toward too 
great uniformity. (Applause.) 

I wonder whether you really appreciate how beautiful your 
country is. Sometimes people grow so familiar with their sur- 
roundings that they fail entirely to appreciate them. I had read 
and heard of the marvelous beauty of Southern California, the 
beauty of your climate, the wonderful fertility of your soil, but 
I had not realized it; I could not realize it until I saw it. It 
seems to me as though there could not be another spot on the 
world's surface blessed in quite the same way that this has been 
blessed. And now, my fellow-citizens, so much has been given 
to you, so much must of right be expected from you. As you 
have for your good fortune been placed down in this beautiful 
region with its wonderful climate, with its soil, with all the 
chance for development that it offers, so we have a right to 
expect a particularly high type of American citizenship from you. 
In the long run, mind you, that is what counts. I have been de- 
lighted to see the orange groves, to see your olive orchards, to 
see all the marvelous products of this soil, the products tem- 
perate and semi-tropic. Of course, in the last analysis the ma- 
terial prosperity of any country rests more even than upon its 
manufactures, its commerce, or its mines, upon what is success- 
fully accomplished by the tillers of the soil, upon the products 
of the soil ; and our material well-being depends in the long run 
more than upon anything else upon what we develop agricul- 
turally; so that I congratulate you upon that. I congratulate 
you upon your wonderful material prosperity; but it is only 
the foundation for the higher life of citizenship, and it can be 
no more. It is indispensable as a foundation of course; the 
house cannot be built unless the foundation is broad and deep; 
we cannot develop the higher life unless we have the materi^ 
prosperity, the physical well-being upon which to develop it. 
But we are not to be excused if we fail to go on and build the 

[38] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



superstructure of intellectual, moral, spiritual growth upon the 
well-being of the body. In introducing me, Judge, you spoke 
of the problems that confront our civilization from within and 
from without. The problems differ from generation to genera- 
tion, but the qualities that are needed to solve them remain 
unchanged from world's end to world's end. The qualities 
needed to solve aright the problems of today are the same quali- 
ties that were needed by the men who in 1861 found themselves 
confronted with the question of whether or not this country 
should remain all united and free, or divided and partially unfree, 
and we can solve, and we will solve all the questions that come 
up if we approach them in the spirit with which Abraham Lincoln 
and the men of his generation approached the mighty task that 
the Lord had set them to do, if we approach them with his cour- 
age, his patience, his resolution and his sane and human com- 
mon sense. The lessons that you taught — you men of the great 
war — applied not only in war, but apply in peace. You sought 
the lesson of brotherhood first. Was there ever brotherhood 
closer than the brotherhood of those who marched to battle 
together, who fought together, who lay out in the frozen mud 
of the winter trenches together, and who saw the brightest and 
best of those around them give up their young lives under battle, 
under bayonet, or on the fever cots of the hospitals ? No brother 
could be closer than that. How did you work out your prob- 
lems there? You worked them out fundamentally by standing 
each on his worth as a man. You worked them out by treating 
the man on your right and the man on your left according to 
what they proved themselves to be without regard to any adven- 
titious or accidental outside circumstances. Take the man on 
the right hand or the man on the left— little you cared for his 
wealth ; little you cared for his social position ; small was your 
concern as to the creed according to which he worshiped his 
Maker. What did concern you was to know whether his mettle 
would ring true on war's red touchstone. That is what was 
of vital consequence to you. If he had that in him; if he had 

[39] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



the iron will, the spirit that drove him forward over defeat to 
the ultimate triumph, all else was of small consequence. (Ap- 
plause.) 

The same thing is true of citizenship now. There is not any 
patent device by which we can get good government. There is 
not any way by which we can alter or reshape the general scheme 
of things, by which we can avoid the necessity of practicing 
the old, humdrum, everyday, commonplace virtues, for the lack 
of which in the individual as in the nation, no brilliancy, no 
genius, can ever atone. As a nation and individually we must 
show the fundamental qualities of hardihood, courage, manliness, 
of decency, morality, clean living, fair dealing as between man 
and man, of common sense, the saving grace of common sense. 
We must show the qualities which made us as a nation able to. 
free ourselves in 1776, able to preserve our national existence in 
1861 ; and if we fail to show them we will go down ; and be- 
cause we will show them we will make of this country the 
mightiest upon which the sun has ever shone. (Applause.) 

New methods must be devised for meeting the various prob- 
lems that come up. Our complex industrial civilization with its 
p-reat concentration of population and of capital in cities, with 
its extraordinary increase in the rapidity and ease of communi- 
cation, alike communication of news and transportation — ^that 
complex civilization has brought new problems before us. It 
has brought much of good and some evil; but it has not altered 
in the slightest the need for the old, fundamental virtues. The 
men of '61 fought for liberty under the law, liberty by and 
through the law. They fought to establish the principle that 
the law was supreme; that no man, great or small, stood above 
it or without it; that no man could violate it, and that no man 
could be denied its protection. Now in civil life no man can 
be allowed to put himself above the law, the law that is to check 
greed and violence, that is to put a stop to every form of outrage 
by one man against another, the law under and through which 
alone can we preserve republican institutions and democratic 

[40] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



liberty. The violence that accompanies license is the hand-maiden 
of tyranny, and has throughout the world's history proved but 
the harbinger of despotism. You, of the great war, forever 
established the fact that there should be no appeal to sectional 
hate in this country, and just as evil is it to strive to arouse any 
spirit of antagonism based upon class or creed. Any form of 
hatred of one's neighbor is hostile to the spirit of our govern- 
ment, whether it take the shape of the arrogance which looks 
down upon those who are less well off, which would oppress 
those less able to protect themselves, or the rancor and envy 
which regard with jealous ill will those who are better off. 
Either feeling is unworthy of American freemen. (Applause.) 

I make my appeal to you, my fellow-citizens, in the name of 
those qualities which underlie the very existence of our form of 
government. I ask for brotherhood. I ask for the willingness 
of each to help the other; for the readiness of men to act in 
combination for the common good ; but I ask you also, as you 
will not inflict wrong, so not to suffer it. I ask you to remember 
that though the law can do something, that though the honest 
administration of the law can do more, that though something 
more can be done by acting in organization, in combination, with 
one's fellows privately, yet that in the long run, in the ultimate 
analysis, each man's success must rest upon the sum of that 
man's individual qualities. That is the determining factor in 
the end as to whether the man rises or falls. 

Every one of you veterans knows that in the war there were 
some men who would not by training or any arming make good 
soldiers. If the man did not have the stuff in him it was not 
there to get out of him. (Applause.) It is just so in citizenship. 
There is not a man of us who does not at times slip or stumble, 
and in that case it speaks ill of any one who fails to reach out 
a helping hand to his brother ; but if a man lies down you cannot 
carry him. You can help a man only in the way which alone 
is of real ultimate help — you can help him to help himself. He 
has got to have it in him to make the effort, to strive. He has 

[41] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



got to have in him the qualities which will make him a good 
husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a man who deals justly 
by others, and does his duty by the State. If he has not got 
it in him, you cannot help him. He will remain to the end a 
drag upon himself and upon every one else. I ask that we 
keep that in mind ; that we remember our obligations to ourselves 
and to the country, and that we steadfastly strive to raise ever 
higher the average of individual citizenship, for if that average 
is high enough, scant need be our concern as to the fate of the 
State. I believe in your future, I believe in our future, because 
I believe with all my heart that in the future all America will 
raise the standard of individual citizenship; that we will raise 
that standard not merely in body and in mind, but in that which 
counts for more than body, for more than mind, in character — 
character, upon which ultimately rests the fate of every nation. 
(Cheers and applause.) 



[4^ 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS TO THE FOREST RANGERS 
AT SANTA BARBARA 

May 9, 190J 

Let me say a word of thanks to the members of the forestry 
force who acted as my escort. I wish to thank the other gen- 
tlemen also, but particularly the members of the forestry force. 
I am, as you gentlemen probably know, exceedingly interested 
in the question of forestry preservation. I think our people are 
growing more and more to understand that in reference to the 
forests and the wild creatures of the wilderness our aim should 
be not to destroy them simply for the selfish pleasure of one 
generation, but to keep them for our children and our children's 
children. I wish you, the Forest Rangers, and also all the 
others, to protect the game and wild creatures, and of course 
in California, where the water supply is a matter of such vital 
moment, the preservation of the forests for the merely utilitarian 
side is of the utmost, of the highest possible consequence; and 
there are no members of our body politic who are doing better 
work than those who are engaged in the preservation of the for- 
ests, the keeping of nature as it is for the sake of its use and 
for the sake of its beauty. (Cheers and applause.) 



[43] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
SURF, CALIFORNIA 

May 9, 1903 

My Fellow- Citizen s : 

I cannot say how much I have enjoyed these three days in 
California. It is the first time I ever was in your great and 
beautiful State ; and but a few hours ago I saw for the first time 
the greatest of all the oceans. I have enjoyed it to the full. I 
have enjoyed the climate, seeing the fruits of the soil, seeing all 
that has been done agriculturally and industrially. I have en- 
joyed noting the marvelous material progress and prosperity; 
but what I have enjoyed most has been seeing the men and 
women of California. It has been to me an education to come 
here to California. I did not need to feel what I felt already, 
how much of our destiny lay on the Pacific, but I am glad to have 
seen your people. I have realized more even than I already 
realized it the fundamental oneness of the American nation. I 
have come from the Atlantic across the continent, and here I 
am addressing an American audience with the same ideals, the 
same aspirations, the same hopes, the same purposes, that the 
audiences have on the Atlantic seaboard, or in the Mississippi 
Valley. I am glad to have met you. I believe in you with all 
my heart and soul, and I believe that your future will be even 
greater than your past. (Cheers and applause.) 



[44] 




Mission Santa Baruara, " Portal of tiik Tiirek Ski lls, 
Santa Barbara, California, May 9, 1903 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT 
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA 

May 9, 1903 

Mr. Chairman, and You, My Fellow -Citiz en s : 

It is indeed a great pleasure to have the chance of meeting you 
this afternoon. For three days now I have been traveling 
through your wonderful and beautiful State and I marvel at its 
fertility. I am not surprised to see you looking happy. I should 
be ashamed of you if you did not. (Applause.) 

I know of this county in connection with certain Eastern agri- 
cultural producers, for unless I mistake, those who offered prizes 
for the largest vegetables and fruits of certain kinds have had 
to bar the products from this county, because they invariably 
won the prizes. (Applause.) I know of one Eastern producer 
who said that the products of this county would have to be 
barred, because he had spent already $500 in prizes to the county 
and had gotten back but $14 for seeds. I have forgotten all of 
the records that you have in the county. I know that the largest 
pumpkin, watermelon and onion came from here, so that your 
agricultural products have made a name for themselves to be 
feared. Of course, in stock raising and dairying the county 
stands equally prominent. I am glad to learn that the State of 
California is erecting here the polytechnic institute for giving 
all the scientific training in the arts of farm life. More and 
more our people have waked to the fact that farming is not only 
a practical, but a scientific pursuit, and that there should be the 
same chance for the tiller of the soil to make his a learned pro- 
fession that there is in any other business. 

For three days I have been traveling through one of those 
regions of our country where the interests are agricultural and 
pastoral, where the tiller of the soil, the man who grows stock. 

[45] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



who is engaged in agriculture, is the man whose interest is pre- 
dominant; and of course it is the merest truism to say that it 
is the earth tiller, the soil tiller, the man of the faiTns, the man 
of the ranches, who stands as the one citizen indispensable to 
the entire community. The welfare of the nation depends even 
more than upon the welfare of the wage-worker, upon the wel- 
fare of the home-maker of the country regions. I congratulate 
you people of California upon the evidence that you have grasped 
the fact which our people must grasp, that the legislation of 
the country must be shaped in the direction of promoting the 
interests of the man who has come on the soil to stay and to 
rear his children to take his place after him. We have passed 
the stage as a nation when we can afford to tolerate the man 
whose aim it is merely to skin the soil and go on ; to skin the 
country, to take off the timber, to exhaust it, and go on ; our 
aim must be by laws promotive of irrigation, by laws securing 
the wise use in perpetuity of the forests, by laws shaped in every 
way to promote the permanent interests of the country. Our 
aim must be to hand over to our children not an impoverished 
but an improved heritage. That is the part of wisdom for our 
people. We wish to hand over our country to our children in 
better shape, not in worse shape, than we ourselves got it. 
(Applause.) 

I have congratulated you upon your material well-being and 
upon the steps that you are taking still further to increase that 
material well-being. I wish further to congratulate you upon 
what counts even more than material prosperity, upon taking 
care of the interests that go to make up the higher life of the 
nation. I am greeted here by men who wear the button that 
shows that they proved true to a lofty ideal when Abraham 
Lincoln called to arms in the hour of the nation's agony. (Ap- 
plause.) Our nation showed itself great in those days because 
the nation's sons in '6i and the years immediately following 
had it in them to care for something more even than material 
well-being, because they had it in them to feel the lift toward 

[46] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



lofty things which only generous souls can feel. I see around 
me the men who took part in the great Civil War, whose pres- 
ence should excuse me from preaching, for their practice preaches 
louder than any words of mine could. (Applause.) 

I have seen everywhere through your State, in addition, the 
care you are taking in educating the children. I have been 
struck by the schools, and as I have said a special word of greet- 
ing to the men who deserve so well of the nation, so I wish to 
say a special greeting to the future, to the children, to those 
who are to be the men and women of the next generation; and 
upon whom it will depend whether this country goes forward 
or not. It is a good thing to raise such products as you have 
raised on your farms ; it is a better thing to bring up such chil- 
dren as I think I have been seeing today. I like the way in 
which, through your schools, you are training the children to 
citizenship in the future. Ultimately, though soil and climate 
will count for much, what will count for most is the average 
character in the individual citizen, the individual man or woman ; 
that is what counts in the long run in making a nation. (Ap- 
plause.) 

I go from you with an even increased faith in the future of 
our country, the future of America, because I go with an even 
increased faith and confidence in what the average American 
citizen is and will be. I believe in you, men and women of 
California, men and women of America, of the United States, 
because I feel that you are not only sound in body and sound in 
mind, but that which counts for more than body, more than 
mind — character, into which many different elements enter- 
but above all, the elements of decency, of courage, and of com- 
m.on sense. (Cheers and applause.) 



[47] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
PASO ROBLES, CALIFORNIA 

May 9» i90J 

My Fellow-Citizens : 

I cannot say how I have enjoyed the three days I have spent 
in California. I had heard much and read much of the wonder- 
ful beauty of your State, of its climate, of the fertility of its 
soil, but I had not been able to fix in my mind what it really 
would be. I think I was a pretty good American when I came 
here, but I feel that I am a better American now. It has done 
me good to see you. I congratulate you upon all that you have 
done in business, in agriculture, in commerce, in industries of 
all kinds ; but most of all I congratulate you and all of us upon 
the type of citizenship that you have produced. In the last 
analysis the nation will go up or go down according to the 
standard of the average man or woman. It is a good thing to 
have farms, ranches, railroads, factories and commerce, but they 
will avail nothing if we have not the right type of average citi- 
zen to take advantage of them. One thing that has pleased me 
particularly in coming through your State has been to see the 
schools, the attention paid to the education of your children. I 
have been glad to meet the men and women, and I think I have 
been even gladder to see the children. (Applause.) Of course 
it is the merest truism to say that not all our natural advantages, 
not all our industrial success will avail unless the American of 
the future is able to take advantage of the achievements of the 
past and to turn them to the best possible account. We need 
the material well-being as the foundation upon which to build 
and we cannot build unless we have that foundation, but it is 
only the foundation and upon it must be raised the superstructure 
of the higher civic life. And for that life you are providing in 

[48] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



preparing those of the next generation for the ever higher spirit- 
ual, moral and intellectual development. I have been very glad 
to see you; glad to have come from the Atlantic, from the East, 
through the West, and now to this West of the West — to Cali- 
fornia. (Applause.) There is another thing I was glad here 
on the seacoast to see — a vessel of the United States Navy. We 
have begun to take our position as a world power, a power 
situated on a continent fronting on two oceans, and we must 
have a navy to assert our position. (Cheers and applause.) 



[49] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
PAJARO, CALIFORNIA 

May II, 190} 

My Fellow-Citizens: 

I want to thank you for coming out to greet me this morning. 
I have been giving much more time to California than to any- 
other State, and I am glad of it, for I have enjoyed every hour 
I have been in your beautiful and wonderful State. I have been 
traveling up from the South and shall now visit San Francisco, 
then go straight through to the North. It seems to me every 
good American that can should visit the Pacific Slope, to realize 
where so much of our country's greatness in the future will lie. 
I did not need to come out here in order to believe in you and 
your work. I knew you well and believed in you before with 
all my heart, but it has done me good to get in touch with you. 
The thing that has impressed me most coming from the Atlantic 
across to the Pacific has been that good Americans are good 
Americans in every part of this country. That is the funda- 
mental point to remember. 

I am glad to have seen you. I want to welcome the men and 
women, and especially the children. Of course, it is a mere 
truism to say that this country depends upon what the next gen- 
eration is. (Applause.) 



[50] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
WATSONVILLE, CALIFORNIA 

May II, 190J 

My Fellow-Citizens : 

I have but a minute here, and I can only express to you my 
appreciation of your having come out to greet me. This is a 
great fruit center; California is a great fruit State, a great 
agricultural State, but, above all, California is a great State for 
Californians. (Applause.) 

The thing that has impressed me most in this country coming 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific is the essential oneness of our 
people, the fact that good Americans are good Americans from 
Maine to California, from the Golden Gate to Sandy Hook 
That is the important part. 

Glad though I am to see all your products, I want to congrat- 
ulate you especially upon one — the children. (Applause.) I 
do not come here to teach; I come hear to learn. It has done 
me good to be in your State and to meet your people. Until 
last week I had never been in California, and I go back an even 
better American than I came, and I think I came out a fairly 
good one. Things that are truisms, that you expect as simply 
part of the natural order of events, need to be impressed upon 
our people as a whole. We need to understand the commanding 
position already occupied, and the infinitely more commanding 
position that will be occupied in the future by our nation on 
the Pacific. This, the greatest of all the oceans, is one which 
more and more during the century opening must pass under 
American influence; and as inevitably happens, when a great 
effort comes, it means that a great burden of responsibility ac- 
companies the effort. A nation cannot be great without paying 

[SI] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



the price of greatness, and only a craven nation will object to 
paying that price. 

.1 believe in you, my countrymen; I believe in our people, and 
therefore I believe that they will dare to be great, therefore I 
believe they will hail the chance this century brings as one which 
it should rejoice a mighty and masterful people to have. And 
we can face the future with the assured confidence of success 
if only we face it in the spirit in which our fathers faced the 
problems of the past. (Cheers and applause.) 



[5^] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT 
SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA 

May II, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and You, My Fellow-Citizens : 

I thank you for the greeting that you have extended to me. 
I wish to say a word of special acknowledgment to the men of 
the Grand Army, to the representatives of the pioneers, to the 
men who proved their loyalty in the supreme test from '61 to 
'65, and to the pioneers who showed the same qualities in win- 
ning this great West that you of the Civil War showed in your 
feat. I also wish to say how pleased I am to have had as my 
escort the men of the Naval Militia. The one thing on which 
this country must forever be a unit is the navy. We must have 
a first-class navy. A nation like ours, with the unique position 
of fronting at once on the Atlantic and the Pacific, a nation 
forced by the mere fact of destiny to play a great, a mighty, a 
masterful part in the world, cannot aflFord to neglect its navy, 
cannot aflford to fail to insist upon the building up of the navy. 
We must go on with the task as we have begun it. We have a 
good navy now. We must make it an even better one in the 
future. We must have an ample supply of the most formidable 
type of fighting ships; we must have those ships practiced; we 
must see that not only are our warships the best in the world, 
but that the men who handle them, the men in the gun turrets, 
the men in the engine rooms, the men in the conning towers, 
are also the best of their kind. I think that our navy is already 
wonderfully good and we must strive to make it even better. 

I am about to visit the grove of the great trees. I wish to 
congratulate you people of California, people of this region, and 
to congratulate all the country on what you have done in pre- 
serving these great trees. Cut down one of these giants and 

[53] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



you cannot fill its place. The ages were their architects and 
we owe it to ourselves and to our children's children to preserve 
them. Nothing has pleased me more here in California than to 
see how thoroughly awake you are to preserve the monuments 
of the past, human and natural. I am glad to see the way in 
which the old mission buildings are being preserved. This great, 
wonderful, new State, this State which is itself an empire, situ- 
ated on the greatest of oceans, should keep alive the sense of 
historic continuity of its past, and should as one step towards 
that end preserve the ancient historic landmarks within its 
limits. I am even more pleased that you should be preserving 
the great and wonderful natural features here, that you should 
have in California a park like the Yosemite, that we should have 
State preserves of these great trees and other preserves where 
individuals and associations have kept them. We should see to 
it that no man for speculative purposes or for mere temporary 
use exploits the groves of great trees. Where the individuals 
and associations of individuals cannot preserve them, the State, 
and, if necessary, the nation, should step in and see to their 
preservation. We should keep the trees as we should keep 
great stretches of the wildernesses as a heritage for our children 
and our children's children. Our aim should be to preserve them 
for use, to preserve them for beauty, for the sake of the nation 
hereafter. 

I shall not try to make any extended address to you. I shall 
only say how glad I am to be here, bid you welcome with all 
my heart, and say how thoroughly I believe in you, and that I 
am a better American for being among you. (Great applause.) 



[54] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT THE BIG TREE GROVE, 
SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA 

May II, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and Ladies First, and to the Rest of the Guests 
IN the Second Place: 

I want to thank you very much for your courtesy in receiving 
me, and to say how much I have enjoyed being here. This is 
the first gHmpse I have ever had of the big trees, and I wish to 
pay the highest tribute I can to the State of CaHfornia, to those 
private citizens and associations of citizens who have co-operated 
with the State in preserving these wonderful trees for the whole 
nation, in preserving them in whatever part of the State they 
may be found. All of us ought to want to see nature preserved; 
and take a big tree whose architect has been the ages, anything 
that man does toward it may hurt it and cannot help it; and 
above all, the rash creature who wishes to leave his name to 
mar the beauties of nature should be sternly discouraged. Take 
those cards pinned up on that tree; they give an air of the 
ridiculous to this solemn and majestic grove. (Applause.) To 
pin those cards up there is as much out of place as if you tacked 
so many tin cans up there. I mean that literally. You should 
save the people whose names are there from the reprobation of 
every individual by taking down the cards at the earliest possible 
moment; and do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful sce- 
nery of this wonderful State unmarred by the vandalism or the 
folly of man. Remember that we have to contend not merely 
with knavery, but with folly; and see to it that you by your 
actions create the kind of public opinion which will put a stop 
to any destruction of or any marring of the wonderful and beau- 
tiful gifts that you have received from nature, that you ought to 

[55] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



hand on as a precious heritage to your children and your chil- 
dren's children. I am, oh, so glad to be here, to be in this majestic 
and beautiful grove, to see the wonderful redwoods, and I thank 
you for giving me the chance, and I do hope that it will be your 
object to preserve them as nature made them and left them, for 
the future. (Cheers and applause.) 



[56] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT 
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA 

May 11, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and You, Men and Women, My Fellow-Citizens, 
My Fellow-Americans: 

It is a great pleasure to greet you today, to speak to the citizens 
of this beautiful city in this great and fertile valley and county. 
Ever since our train came into the Santa Clara Valley it has 
been as though we were passing through a garden. (Applause.) 
I do not wonder at the products, now that I have seen the place. 
This is one of the famous agricultural counties of the whole 
country. In hardly any other county has work quite of your 
kind been done in the raising of deciduous fruits, notably prunes. 
(Laughter and applause.) Your city is bound to grow because 
your county is bound to grow, and of course the city will grow 
where the country tributary to it produces so much. But there 
was something that pleased me even more than the prunes, and 
that was the school houses as I passed. (Laughter and applause.) 

Here in this county you have many notable educational insti- 
tutions. I understand that you have the oldest normal school in 
the State; that Santa Clara is the oldest college; you also have 
the University of the Pacific, the Lick Observatory and Leland 
Stanford University; and above all, that upon which all the 
higher education rests — the common school educational system 
of the State. It is a fine thing, an absolutely necessary thing, to 
have a foundation of material well-being upon which to build 
the higher life; but it is equally indispensable that upon that 
foundation the higher life shall be built. I congratulate you 
that in your care for the body you have not forgotten to care 
for the higher, the intellectual, the spiritual side of man. I have 
been greeted here as I have been greeted throughout California 

[57] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



by the men of the great Civil War, the veterans to whom we 
owe it to that there is a country for you and me to be proud of 
today. They, by their lives, by the record of their deeds, teach us 
in more practical fashion than it can be taught by any preach- 
ing, for they teach us by practice, that in the ultimate analysis 
the greatness of a nation is to be measured not by the output of 
its industrial products, not by its material prosperity, not by 
the products of the farm, factory, business house, but by the 
products of its citizenship, by the men and women that that 
nation produces. (Applause.) 

When Sumter's guns thundered on that April morning in *6i 
no amount of industrial prosperity unaccompanied by the lift 
toward higher things could have saved the nation. We had then 
come to one of those great crises of national affairs when the 
need was for the elemental virtues of mankind to be displayed, 
when it was too late to appeal to mechanical ingenuity, mechan- 
ical inventiveness, business capacity on the greater or on the 
lesser scale, when nothing could save us but the manhood of the 
men and the womanhood of the women, when we had to rely 
upon the man who went to battle and upon the woman to whom 
fell the harder task of staying at home, with brother or lover, 
father or husband gone to the front, left without the bread- 
winner, to work her way as best she could, and to endure, in 
addition, the sickening anxiety for the loved ones who were in 
the forefront of the battle. We had to depend upon the men 
who, when the final call was made, were willing to count every- 
thing, life itself, as dross in the scale compared with their eager 
championship of national honor, of the unity of the flag, the 
sacredness of the republic — the men whose one ambition it was 
to spend and be spent when Abraham Lincoln called, and to 
follow the flag of Grant, of Sherman, of Thomas, of Sheridan and 
Farragut through the years of alternating victory and defeat 
until over the hills of disaster they saw the sunset of triumph at 
Appomattox. (Cheers and applause.) 

The problems that confront us from generation to generation 

[58] 



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BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



change. The methods of solution for each problem must be 
sought out carefully in order that that problem may be solved 
aright; but the fundamental qualities needed by the men of 
today are those that were needed by the men of yesterday, and 
they will be the same that in their turn the men of tomorrow 
will need. There is no patent substitute for the fundamental 
virtues. Nothing can make good citizenship in men who have 
not got in them courage, hardihood, decency, sanity, the spirit 
of truth-telling and truth-seeking, the spirit that dares and en- 
dures, the spirit that knows what it is to have a lofty ideal, and 
yet to endeavor to realize that ideal in practical fashion. (Ap- 
plause.) That is why I congratulate you upon the care you are 
paying to your educational system, to the training of the young. 
Of course there are natures which no training can develop, be- 
cause if the stuff is not there nothing can be made out of them. 
But training will make a good citizen a better citizen. Training 
when applied to raw material will do good to that raw material. 
I congratulate you, I congratulate all our people, upon the 
realization shown by California of the fact that though the 
interests of the body are great, the interests of the soul are 
greater ; that though we must take care of the first— we are not 
to be excused if we fail to show thrift, energy, business intelli- 
gence, the power of hard work for material ends— we are not 
to be excused if we fail to show those qualities, yet that those 
qualities cannot by themselves suffice, that to them we must add 
others. The body should be trained ; even more should the mind 
be trained ; and most of all should we train character ; character, 
into which so many elements enter; but three above all— de- 
cency, the spirit of fair dealing, of decent behavior in the family, 
in the neighborhood, towards the State; and to decency to be 
added courage, the spirit that dares and endures and does and to 
both to be added the saving grace of common sense. I congrat- 
ulate you upon your thought for the next generation, for Cali- 
fornia's greatness. The greatness of the Union in the future will 
depend upon the kind of men and women who act as your heirs. 

[59] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



If they are not the right kind they will mar and spoil the heritage 
you have left; and that heritage can be kept as it should and will 
be kept, because the boys and girls of today are being trained to 
become fit citizens of tomorrow. 

In closing I want to thank you and to say how I have enjoyed 
being here in California. Above all things, I have enjoyed the 
knowledge that coming across this continent from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, from the East to the West, and now west of 
the West into California — for California stands by itself (ap- 
plause) — wherever I have been addressing any audience I have 
been able to make my appeal to the men and women to whom I 
speak purely as Americans speaking to them as Americans, and 
as nothing else. (Applause.) You, the men of the great war, 
fought to put an end once for all to the evil spirit of sectional 
hatred. No man is a good American — I could put that stronger 
— the worst enemy of American institutions is the man who seeks 
to excite one set of Americans against their fellow-Americans. 
(Cheers and applause.) And it matters nothing whether the 
appeal is made in the fancied interest of a class, of a creed, or 
of a section, the man is a traitor to our institutions and spirit 
who makes it. We can make this government a success only by 
proceeding in accordance with its fundamental proposition and 
treating each man, Northerner or Southerner, Easterner or West- 
erner, whatever his birthplace, whatever his creed, his occupa- 
tion, his means, as a man and as nothing else. (Applause.) I 
believe in you, I believe in the future of this State, I believe in 
the future of this nation, because I am sure that ultimately, no 
matter what may be any temporary swerving, our people will 
consent to no other base for the management of this government, 
and will insist invariably in the long run that we remain true to 
the principles of those who with Washington founded the gov- 
ernment, and those who with Lincoln preserved the government 
and made this a nation of freemen, each guaranteed his rights, 

[60] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



each prevented from wronging any one else and each assured of 
his being treated exactly as his conduct entitles him to be treated. 
(Cheers and applause.) 



[6i] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
CAMPBELL, CALIFORNIA 

May II, 190J 

It is a very great pleasure to be here. It is a great pleasure to 
take part in planting this tree in the presence of the children of 
Campbell County. I do not know of anything that bids better 
for our material well-being than the tree culture; and I know 
of nothing among the many things that the National Grange has 
done that it has done better than fostering the habit of caring 
for the forests where they exist, and the planting of new trees. 
And then even above trees come the children, that is the all- 
important part. It is a peculiar pleasure to me to address the 
children. I have but just one word to say to you; it is some- 
thing I should say to your elders also. I believe in play and I 
believe in work. I want to see you play hard while you play,, 
and when you work do not play at all. (Cheers and applause.) 



[62] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 

LELAND STANFORD JR. UNIVERSITY, 

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA 

May 12, 1903 

President Jordan, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, and Espe- 
cially You, My Fellow-College Men and Women : 

I thank you for your greeting, and I know you will not grudge 
my saying, first of all, a special word of thanks to the men of 
the Grand Army. It is a fine thing to have before a body of 
students men who by their practice have rendered it unnecessary 
that they should preach (applause) ; for what we have to teach 
by precept, you, the men of '61 to '65, have taught by deed, by 
action. I am glad, I am proud as an American college man 
myself to have seen the tablet outside within the court which 
shows that this young university sent eighty -five of her sons to 
war when the country called for them. (Applause.) I came 
from a college which boasts as its proudest building that which 
is to stand to the memory of Harvard's sons who responded 
to the call of Lincoln when the hour of the nation's danger was 
at hand. It will be a bad day for this country and a worse day 
for all educative institutions in this country if ever such a call 
is made, and the men of college training do not feel it peculiarly 
incumbent upon them to respond. (Applause.) 

The last week I have thoroughly enjoyed, and my enjoyment 
would have been unmarred by a flaw if I had not been obliged 
to make speeches. I have been traveling through California. It 
is the first time I have ever come to the Pacific Coast and my 
visit to the wonderful and beautiful State has been to me one of 
absorbing interest. I cannot say how I have appreciated being 
here; the chance to see the natural products, the scenery, the 
landscape, all that man has done with the soil, how he has 

[63] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



taken advantage of the climate, what he has done materially and 
socially, what he has done in building upon the material well- 
being which he has secured from soil and ulimate the higher 
life of the intellect, the spirit and the soul. Now I have come to 
this great institution of learning and I wonder whether you 
yourselves fully appreciate the mere physical beauty of your 
surroundings. I was not prepared in the least (and I thought I 
was prepared for it) for the beauty of your surroundings. You 
have had these plans of your university made by a great archi- 
tect, native to our own American soil, who himself had the sense 
to adapt — not to copy in servile fashion — but to adapt the old 
Californian architecture to the new university uses, and so we 
have here a great institution of learning absolutely unique, even 
in its outward aspect, situated in this beautiful valley with the 
hills in the background, under this sky, with these buildings, and 
if this university does not turn out the right kind of citizenship 
and the right kind of scholarship, I shall be more than disap- 
pointed. (Applause.) 

I want to say one word personally. President Jordan has been 
kind enough to allude to me as an old friend. Mr. Jordan is too 
modest to say that he has long been not only a friend, but a 
man to whom I have turned for advice and help, before and 
since I became President. (Applause.) I am glad to have the 
chance of acknowledging my obligations to him, and I am also 
glad that when I ask you to strive toward productive scholarship, 
toward productive citizenship, I can use the president of the 
university as an example. Of course, in any of our American 
institutions of learning, even more important than the production 
of scholarship, is the production of citizenship. That is the most 
important thing that any institution of learning can produce. 
There is a great proportion, a great number of students who 
cannot and should not try, in after life, to lead a career of 
scholarship, but no university can take high rank if it does not 
aim at the production of, and succeed in producing, a certain num- 
ber of deep and thorough scholars. Not scholars whose scholar- 

[64] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ship is of the barren kind, but men of productive scholarship, 
men who do good work, I trust great work, in the fields of lit- 
erature, of art, of science, in all their manifold activities. Here 
in California this nation, composite in its race stocks, speaking 
an Old World tongue, and with an inherited Old World culture, 
has acquired an absolutely new domain. I do not mean new 
only in the sense of additional territory like that already 
possessed, I mean new in the sense of new surroundings, to use 
the scientific phrase, of a new environment. Being new, I think 
we have a right to look for a substantial achievement on the 
part of your people along new lines. I do not mean the self- 
conscious striving after newness, which is only too apt to breed 
eccentricity, but I mean that those among you whose bent is 
toward scholarship as a career, if those will keep in mind the 
fact that such scholarship should be productive, and should 
therefore aim at giving to the world some addition to the world's 
stock of what is useful or beautiful, and if you work simply and 
naturally, taking advantage of your surroundings as you find 
them, then in my belief a new mark will be made in the history 
of the intellectual achievement by our people, by our race. You 
of this institution are blessed in its extraordinary physical beauty 
and appropriateness of architecture and surroundings, with its 
suggestion of what I might call the Americanized Greek. Such 
is your institution, situated on the shores of this great ocean, 
built by a race which has come steadily westward, which has 
come to where the Occident looks west to the Orient, a race 
whose members here, fresh, vigorous, with the boundless possi- 
bilities of the future brought to their very doors in a sense that 
cannot be possible for the members of the race situated farther 
east — surely there will be some great outcome in the way not 
merely of physical, but of moral and intellectual work worth 
doing. I should think but ill of you if you developed along the 
lines of the prig, and if what I have read about California is 
true, if the present proper desire for athletic sports continues to 
develop, you are saved from that danger. (Applause.) I do 

[65] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



not want you to turn out prigs; I do not want you to turn out 
the self-conscious. I believe, with all my heart, in play. I want 
you to play hard without encroaching on your work. I do, 
nevertheless, think you ought to have at least the consciousness 
of the serious side of what all this means, and of the necessity 
of effort, thrust upon you, so that you may justify by your deeds 
in the future your training and the extraordinary advantages 
under which that training has been obtained. 

America, the Republic of the United States, is of course in a 
peculiar sense typical of the present age. We represent the 
fullest development of the democratic spirit joined to the ex- 
traordinary and highly complex industrial growth of the last 
half century. It behooves us to justify by our acts the claims made 
for that political and economic progress. We will never justify 
the existence of the republic by merely talking about what the 
republic has done each Fourth of July. If our homage is lip 
loyalty merely the great deeds of those who went before us, the 
great deeds of the times of Washington and of the times of 
Lincoln, the great deeds of the men who won the Revolution 
and founded the nation, and of the men who preserved it, who 
made it a Union and a free republic— these great deeds will 
simply arise to shame us. We can honor our fathers and our 
fathers' fathers only by ourselves striving to rise level to their 
standard. There are plenty of tendencies for evil in what we 
see round about us. Thank heaven, there are an even greater 
number of tendencies for good, and one of the things, Mr. Jor- 
dan, which it seems to me gives this nation cause for hope is the 
national standard of ambition which makes it possible to recog- 
nize with admiration and regard such work as the founding of 
a university of this character. It speaks well for our nation that 
men and women should desire during their lives to devote the 
fortunes which they were able to acquire or to inherit because 
of our system of government, because of our social system, to 
objects so entirely worthy and so entirely admirable as the 
foundation of a great seat of learning such as this. (Applause.) 

[66] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



All that we outsiders can do is to pay our tribute of respect to 
the dead and to the living who have done such good, and at 
least to make it evident that we appreciate to the full what has 
been done. 

I have spoken of scholarship ; I want to go back to the question 
of citizenship, the question affecting not merely the scholars 
among you, not merely those who are hereafter to lead lives 
devoted to science, to art, to productivity in literature. And just 
let me say one word — when you take up science, art and litera- 
ture, remember that one first-class bit of work is better than 
one thousand fairly good bits of work (applause) ; that as the 
years roll on the man or the woman who has been able to make a 
masterpiece with the pen, the brush, the pencil, in any way, that 
that man, that woman, has rendered a service to the country 
such as not all his or her compeers who merely do fairly good 
second-rate work can ever accomplish. But only a limited num- 
ber of you, only a limited number of us, can ever become scholars 
or work successfully along the lines I have spoken of, but we 
can all be good citizens. We can all lead a life of action, a life 
of endeavor, a life that is to be judged primarily by the effort, 
somewhat by the result, along the lines of helping the growth of 
what is right and decent and generous and lofty in our several 
communities, in the State, in the nation. 

And you, men and women, who have had the advantages of a 
college training are not to be excused if you fail to do not as 
well as, but if you fail to do more than the average man outside 
who has not had your advantages. (Applause.) Every now 
and then I meet (at least I meet him in the East, and I dare say 
he is to be found here) the man who, having gone through 
college, feels that somehow that confers upon him a special 
distinction which relieves him from the necessity of showing 
himself as good as his fellows. (Applause.) I see you recog- 
nize the type. That man is not only a curse to the community, 
and incidentally to himself, but he is a curse to the cause of 
academic education, the college and university training, because 

[67] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



by his existence he serves as an excuse for those who would like 
to denounce such education. Your education, your training, will 
not confer on you one privilege in the way of excusing you from 
effort or from work. All it can do, and what it should do, is to 
make you a little better fitted for such effort, for such work; 
and I do not care whether that is in business, politics, in no mat- 
ter what branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you 
have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit you 
to do a little better than the average man that you meet. It is in- 
cumbent upon you to show that the training has had that effect. 
It ought to enable you to do a little better for yourselves, and 
if you have in you souls capable of a thrill of generous emotion, 
souls capable of understanding what you owe to your training, 
to your alma mater, to the past and the present that have given 
you all that you have — if you have such souls, it ought to make 
you doubly bent upon disinterest -d work for the State and the 
nation. (Applause.) Such work can be done along many differ- 
ent lines. 

I want today, here in California, to make a special appeal to 
all of you, and to California as a whole, for work along a certain 
line — the line of preserving your great natural advantages alike 
from the standpoint of use and from the standpoint of beauty. 
If the students of this institution have not by the mere fact of 
their surroundings learned to appreciate beauty, then the fault 
is in you and not in the surroundings. Here in California you 
have some of the great wonders of the world. You have a singu- 
larly beautiful landscape, singularly beautiful and singularly ma- 
jestic scenery, and it should certainly be your aim to try to pre- 
serve for those who are to come after you that beauty; to try 
to keep unmarred that majesty. Closely entwined with keeping 
unmarred the beauty of your scenery, of your great natural at- 
tractions, is the question of making use of, not for the moment 
merely, but for future time, of your great natural products. Yes- 
terday I saw for the first time a grove of your great trees, a 
grove which it has taken the ages several thousands of years to 

[68] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



build up; and I feel most emphatically that we should not turn 
a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror pene- 
trated to the valley of the Euphrates, which it has taken so many 
thousands of years to build up, and which can be put to better 
use, into shingles. (Applause.) That, you may say, is not look- 
ing at the matter from the practical standpoint. There is nothing 
more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty, than 
the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher emotions 
in mankind. But, furthermore, I appeal to you from the stand- 
point of use. A few big trees, of unusual size and beauty, should 
be preserved for their own sake; but the forests as a whole 
should be used for business purposes, only they should be used 
in a way that will preserve them as permanent sources of national 
wealth. In many parts of California the whole future welfare 
of the State depends upon the way in which you are able to use 
your water supply; and the preservation of the forests and the 
preservation of the use of the water are inseparably connected. 
I believe we are past the stage of national existence when we 
could look on complacently at the individual who skinned the 
land and was perfectly content for the sake of three years' profit 
for himself to leave a desert for the children of those who were 
to inherit the soil. I think we have passed that stage. We should 
handle, and I think we now do handle, all problems such as 
those of forestry and of the preservation and use of our waters 
from the standpoint of the permanent interests of the home- 
maker in any region — the man who comes in not to take what he 
can out of the soil and leave, having exploited the country, but 
who comes to dwell therein, to bring up his children, and to 
leave them the heritage in the country not merely unimpaired, 
but if possible even improved. That is the sensible view of 
civic obligation, and the policy of the State and of the nation 
should be shaped in that direction. It should be shaped in the 
interest of the home-maker, the actual resident, the man who is 
not only to be benefited himself, but whose children and children's 
children are to be benefited by what he has done. California has 

[69] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



for years, I am happy to say, taken a more sensible, a more in- 
telligent interest in forest preservation than any other State. It 
early appointed a forest commission, later on some of the func- 
tions of that commission were replaced by the Sierra Club, a club 
which has done much on the Pacific Coast to perpetuate the spirit 
of the explorer and the pioneer. Then I am happy to say a great 
business interest showed an intelligent and farsighted spirit which 
is of happy augury, for the Redwood Manufacturers of San 
Francisco were first among lumbermen's associations to give as- 
sistance to the cause of practical forestry. The study of the red- 
wood which the action of this association made possible was the 
pioneer study in the co-operative work which is now being car- 
ried out between lumbermen all over the United States and the 
Federal Bureau of Forestry. All of this kind of work is pecu- 
liarly the kind of work in which we have a right to expect not 
merely hearty co-operation from, but leadership in college men 
trained in the universities of this Pacific Coast State (applause) ; 
for the forests of this State stand alone in the world. There are 
none others like them anywhere. There are no other trees any- 
where like the giant Sequoias ; nowhere else is there a more 
beautiful forest than that which clothes the western slope of the 
Sierra. Very early your forests attracted lumbermen from other 
States, and by the course of timber land investments some of the 
best of the big tree groves were threatened with destruction. I 
am sorry to say destruction came upon some of them, but I am 
happy to say that the women of California rose to the emergency 
through the California Club, and later the Sempervirens Club 
took vigorous action, but the Calaveras grove is not yet safe, 
and there should be no rest until that safety is secured, by the 
action of private individuals, by the action of the State, by the 
action of the nation. The interest of California in forest pro- 
tection was shown even more effectively by the purchase of the 
Big Basin Redwood Park, a superb forest property the possession 
of which should be a source of just pride to all citizens jealous of 
California's good name. 

[70] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



I appeal to you, as I say, to protect these mighty trees, these 
wonderful monuments of beauty. I appeal to you to protect them 
for the sake of their beauty, but I also make the appeal just as 
strongly on economic grounds ; as I am well aware that in deal- 
ing with such questions a farsighted economic policy must be 
that to which alone in the long run one can safely appeal. The 
interests of California in forests depend directly of course upon 
the handling of her wood and water supplies and the supply of 
material from the lumber woods and the production of agricul- 
tural products on irrigated farms. The great valleys which 
stretch through the State between the Sierra Nevada and the 
Coast Ranges must owe their future development as they owe 
their present prosperity to irrigation. Whatever tends to destroy 
the water supply of the Sacramento, the San Gabriel, and the 
other valleys strikes vitally at the welfare of California. The 
welfare of California depends in no small measure upon the pres- 
ervation of water for the purposes of irrigation in those beauti- 
ful and fertile valleys which cannot grow crops by rainfall alone. 
The forest cover upon the drainage basins of streams used for 
irrigation purposes is of prime importance to the interests of the 
entire State. Now keep in mind that the whole object of forest 
protection is as I have said again and again the making and main- 
taining of prosperous homes. I am not advocating forest pro- 
tection from the aesthetic standpoint only. I do advocate the 
keeping of big trees, the great monarchs of the woods, for the 
sake of their beauty, but I advocate the preservation and wise use 
of the forests because I feel it essential to the interests of the 
actual settlers. I am asking that the forests be used wisely for the 
sake of the successors of the pioneers, for the sake of the settlers 
who dwell on the land and by doing so extend the borders of our 
civilization. I ask it for the sake of the man who makes his farm 
in the woods, or lower down along the side of the streams which 
have their rise in the m.ountains. Every phase of the land policy 
of the United States is, as it by right ought to be, directed to the 
upbuilding of the home maker. The one sure test of all public 

[71] 



J 



i 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



land legislation should be ; does it help to make and to keep pros- 
perous homes ? It it does, the legislation is good. If it does not, 
the legislation is bad. Any legislation which has a tendency to 
give land in large tracts to people who will lease it out to tenants 
is undesirable. We do not want to ever let our land policy be 
shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to 
others. "We want to make the smaller man who, under such con- 
ditions would rent — we want to make them actual proprietors. 
We must shape our policy so that these men themselves shall be 
the land owners, the makers of homes, the keepers of homes. 

Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their purposes, 
have been twisted into an improper use, so that there have grown 
up abuses under them by which they tend to create a class of men 
who, under one color and another, obtain large tracts of soil for 
speculative purposes, or to rent out to others; and there should 
be now a thorough scrutiny of our land laws with the object of 
so amending them as to do away with the possibility of such 
^abuses. /if it was not for the national irrigation act we would be 
past the time when Uncle Sam could give every man a 
farm. Comparatively little of our land is left which is adapted 
to farming without irrigation. The home maker on the public 
land must hereafter, in the great majority of cases, have water 
for irrigation, or the making of his home will fail. Let us keep 
that fact before our mind. Do not misunderstand me when I 
have spoken of the defects of our land laws. Our land laws have 
served a noble purpose in the past and have become the models 
for other governments. The homestead law has been a notable 
instrument for good. To establish a familj-- permanently upon 
a quarter section of land, or of course upon a less quantity if it 

irrigated land, is the best use to which it can be put. ■'"The 
first need of any nation is intelligent and honest ci'tizensr Such 
can come only from honest and intelligent homes, and to get 
the good citizenship we must get the good homes. It is absolutely 
necessary that the remainder of our public land should be re- 
served for the home maker, and it is necessary in my judgment 

[72] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



♦hat there should be a revision of the land laws and a cutting 
out of such provisions from them as in actual practice under pres- 
ent conditions tend to make possible the acquisition of large 
tracts for speculative purposes or for the purpose of leasing to 
others ^ j " ^' 

I have said th at good laws alone will not secure good adminis- 
tration^Citizenship is the prime test in the welfare of the nation 
)ut we need good laws; and above all we need good land laws 
throughout the West. We want to see the free farmer own his 
own home. The best of the public lands are already in private 
hands, and yet the rate of their disposal is steadily increasing. 
More than six million acres were patented during the first three 
months of the present year. It is time for us to see that our re- 
maining public lands are saved for the home maker to the utmost 
limit of his possible us e^ j I say this to you of this university be- 
"causF we'Tiavea right to expect that the best trained, the best 
educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Mountains and 
great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and 
right use of the forests, in securing the right use of the waters, 
and of seeing to it that our land policy is not twisted from its 
original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change 
when such change is necessary in the line of that purpose, the 
purpose being to turn the public domain into farms each to be 
the property of the man who actually tills it and makes his home 
on it. (Applause.) 

Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before such 
a body as that I am addressing. Work! of course you will have 
to work. I should be sorry for you if you did not have to work. 
(Applause.) Of course you will have to work, and I envy you 
the fact that before you, before the graduates of this university 
lies the chance of lives to be spent in hard labor for great and 
glorious and useful causes, hard labor for the uplifting of your 
States, of the Union, of all mankind. (Cheers and applause.) 




[73] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
BURLING AM E, CALIFORNIA 

May 12, 190J 

Let me thank you for coming out to see me, and say how I 
have enjoyed coming here. I have enjoyed being in California 
for the last week, and it has been the greatest possible pleasure. 
(Cheers and applause.) 



[74] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE 
BUILDING OF THE YOUNG MEN'S 
CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, SAN FRAN- 
CISCO, CALIFORNIA 

May 12, 190J 

Mr. Chairman, and You, My Fellow-Citizens, Men and 
Women of This Great City, of This Great State : 

Few things could have given me more pleasure than the priv- 
ilege of taking part at the dedication, free of debt, of this build- 
ing to the uses for which it is dedicated. It would be hard to 
overestimate the amount of good work done by the Young Men's 
Christian Associations and the Young Women's Christian 
Associations. (Applause.) I well remember that I used to feel 
for a long time indignant that there were not Young Women's 
Christian Associations also, and how pleased I was when they 
started and the development they attained. It seems to me that 
the Y. M. C. A. has been able to a very marked degree to com- 
bine that practical efficiency in action, in adherence to a lofty 
ideal which should be the aim of all decent citizenship through- 
out our country. (Applause.) 

Of course it is not enough to have mere efficiency. The more 
efficient a man is the more dangerous he is if that efficiency is 
not guided by the proper type of spirit, by the proper sense of 
moral responsibility. Of course it is a mere truism to say that 
the very abilities, physical, mental, moral, that the very abilities 
of the body, the mind and the soul, which make a man potent 
for good, if they are guided aright, make him dangerous to him- 
self and to the whole community if they are guided wrong. And 
the man because of his strength, because of his courage, of his 
power, can do best work for decency, if these attributes are used 
in the proper service, will do most harm if there is no guiding 

[75] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



principle behind them. As I say, that is a mere truism; you all 
of you know it, in dealing in your own families, with your neigh- 
bors, in your relations with the State, that strength of any kind, 
physical, mental, is but a source of danger if it is not guided 
aright. On the other hand it is just as important for every man 
or woman, who is striving for decency to keep ever in mind the 
further fact that unless there is power, efficiency, behind the 
effort for decency, scant is the good that will come. It is not 
enough to have mere aspiration after righteousness; it is not 
enough to have the lofty ideal; with it must go the power of in 
some sort practically realizing it. The cloistered virtue which 
fears the rough contact with the world can avail but little in our 
eminently practical civilization of today, in the rough and tumble 
life made necessary, inevitably attendant upon the development of 
a strong and masterful people working out its fate through the 
complex industrialism of this age. With decency there must go 
the power practically to apply it in life, practically to work it 
out, and to work it out for the benefit of others as well as for 
one's self. The Y. M. C. A. stands for so much because it repre- 
sents the work of men and women who to a generous enthusiasm 
for their fellows, to a lofty ideal of service for the Giver of good, 
and for all mankind, join the power to realize that ideal in prac- 
tical ways, the power to work concretely for the attainment of 
at least some measure of the good sought. 

I have come across the work of the Young Men's Christian 
Association in many different walks of life. I do not know any 
branch of it that has done better work than the branch connected 
with the railway organizations, for instance, and I naturally feel 
a peculiar interest in and rejoice peculiarly over the work done 
among the soldiers and sailors wearing the uniform of the United 
States Government. (Applause.) Every decent American ought 
to be proud of the army and the navy of Uncle Sam. (Applause.) 
Therefore, it is peculiarly incumbent upon us to see that the man 
in that army or navy has a help given in the right way, not the 
wrong way (applause) ; that he is given a chance for whole- 

[76] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



some amusement, a chance to lead an upright and honorable life 
in his hours of relaxation. Another thing the Y. M. C. A. repre- 
sents, and that is knowledge of human nature. You are not 
going to do very much good with human nature if you attempt to 
take the bad out of it, by leaving a vacuum, for that vacuum is 
going to be filled with something, and if you do not fill it with 
what is good it will be filled with what is evil. (Applause.) The 
Young Men's Christian Association represents the effort to pro- 
vide for the body as well as for the mind, to help young men to 
educate themselves, to train themselves for the practical life as 
well as for the higher life, and to give them amusement and re- 
laxation that will educate and not debase them. In other words, 
the Y. M. C. A. in all its branches is working for civic and 
social righteousness, for decency, for good citizenship. There is 
no patent recipe for getting good citizenship. You get it by ap- 
plying the old, old rules of decent conduct, the rules in accord- 
ance with which decent men have had to shape their lives from 
the beginning. A good citizen, a man who stands as he should 
stand in his relations to the State, to the nation, must first of 
all be a good member of his own family (applause) ; a good 
father or son, brother or husband, a man who does right the 
thing that is nearest, a man who is a good neighbor, and I use 
neighbor broadly, who handles himself as his self-respect should 
bid him handle himself in his relations with the community at 
large, in his relations with those whom he employs, or by whom 
he is employed, with those with whom he comes in contact in 
any form of business relations, or in any other way. If there is 
one lesson which I think each of us learns as he grows older, it 
is that it is not what the man works at, provided, of course, it 
is respectable and honorable in character, that fixes his place; it 
is the way he works at it. (Applause.) Providence working in 
ways that to us are inscrutable conditions our lives so that but few 
men can choose exactly the work they would like best. One man 
finds that his lines lie in pleasant places; another not; one man 
finds that to him is allotted one task and another that he must 

[77] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



undertake an entirely different task. All the tasks are necessary. 
Every man engaged in this great city on this day in any of the 
innumerable kinds of work necessary to the legitimate life of the 
city, is himself doing necessary and honorable work; and if we 
are sincere in our professions of adherence to the principles laid 
down to the Founder of Christianity, if we are sincere in our 
professions of adherence to the immutable laws of righteousness 
we will honor in others and ourselves the power of each to do 
decently and well the work allotted to him and ask nothing fur- 
than that. (Applause.) If we can get ourselves and the 
community at large really imbued with that spirit nine tenths of 
the difficulties that beset us will vanish. For far more important 
in causing trouble than any material misery or material misfor- 
tune, is the moral misery, the moral misfortune, the moral wrong- 
doing which, on the one hand, makes a man arrogant to those 
whom he regards as less well off than himself, and which on the 
other hand manifests itself in the equally base shape of rancor, 
hate, envy, or jealousy for those better off. (Applause.) One 
form of misconduct is just as bad as the other, and to preach 
against either only to those afflicted by the other does no good. 
(Applause.) When we practically realize that the worth lies in 
the way of doing the work; that that applies whether your work 
is that of employer to employed, of townsman or countryman, 
of the man who works with his head or the man who works 
with his hands; when we practically realize that, each man will 
have too much respect for himself and for his brother ever to 
permit himself either to look down upon that brother, or to re- 
gard him with envy and jealousy, either one. (Applause.) When 
we get that spirit in the community we will have taken a longer 
stride toward at least an imperfect realization in this world of 
the principle of applied Christianity than has ever been taken in 
the world before. (Applause.) 

I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share in however 
small a degree in the work that you are doing, and I wish you 
Godspeed. (Cheers and applause.) 

[78] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT BANQUET TENDERED BY 
THE CITIZENS OF SAN FRANCISCO, 
CALIFORNIA, AT PALACE HOTEL 

May iz, 190} 

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, and You, My Hosts : 

Let me thank you with all my heart for the more than kind- 
ness, the more than courtesy and cordiality, with which I have 
been treated in California from the hour when I first set foot 
within her borders. Governor, the message that I shall send back 
is: I have come to California; I have seen; and I have been 
conquered by California's citizens and California's Governor. 

And, Mr. Mayor, as you said in your speech, the thing that has 
struck me most coming here, coming from the East through the 
West, west of the West to California— the thing that has struck 
me most is that though I have never been in your great and 
beautiful State before, though I have known your citizens only as 
I met them elsewhere, I am absolutely at home, for I am speaking 
as one American to his fellow- Americans. (Cries of "Good!" 
Cheers and applause.) I have been pleased with the diversity 
of the country, but, oh my fellow-countrymen, I have been pleased 
infinitely more with the unity of our country. (Applause.) While 
I am not by inheritance a Puritan, I have acquired certain traits 
one of which is an uneasy feeling which Lthink a large number 
of Americans share, that when we are having a good time, it is 
not quite right. (Laughter and applause.) And during the week 
that I have been in California I have enjoyed myself so much that 
I have had a slight feeling that maybe I was not quite doing 
my duty. (Applause.) But I cannot say that I am penitent about 
it. 

And now, my fellow-citizens, let me try to express, for I can 

[79] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



only try, I cannot fully express, how I have enjoyed and ap- 
preciated my visit to California, my sojourn among you. It has 
been a genuine revelation, for while I knew of much that I should 
see, I could not realize it until I had seen it. I think I was a 
fairly good American a week ago when I came into your State, 
but I am a better one now (applause), and even more confident 
in the nation's future and more resolute to do whatever in my 
power lies to bring about that future. (Applause.) I thank you; 
I thank the citizens of the Golden State for their greeting. I re- 
joice with you in the wonderful prosperity of California, and that 
prosperity is but part of the prosperity of the whole nation. 
Speaking broadly, prosperity must of necessity come to all of us 
or to none of us. There are sporadic exceptions. Of course we 
all of us know people who cannot be made prosperous by any 
season of good fortune. There will be exceptions, individual 
and local, but the law of brotherhood is the universal law, the 
law upon which the well-being of this nation is based, and taken 
as a whole we can state with absolute certainty that if good times 
come they will come more or less to all sections and all classes, 
and that if hard times come, while they may bear unequally upon 
us, yet more or less they bear upon each State, upon each set of 
individuals. For weal or for woe, we of this country are indis- 
solubly bound together. (Cries of "Good!" Cheers and applause.) 
In the long run we shall go up or go down accordingly as the 
whole nation goes up or goes down. Therefore it is that no 
more wicked deed can be done than the deed of him who would 
seek to make any of our people believe that they can rise by 
trampling down their fellows. (Cheers and applause.) And no 
more wicked appeal can be made than the appeal to rancor, to 
hatred, to jealousy, whether made in the name of a section or in 
the name of a class. (Applause.) 

The Golden State has a future of even brighter promise than 
most of her older sisters, and yet the future is bright for all of us. 
California, still in her youth, can look forward to such growth as 



[80] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



only a few of her sisters can share, yet there are immense pos- 
sibilities of growth for all our States from one end of the Union 
to the other. In this growth, in keeping and increasing our pros- 
perity, the most important factor must be the character of our 
citizenship. Nothing can take the place of the average quality 
of energy, thrift, business enterprise and sanity in our community 
as a whole. Unless the average individual in our nation has to 
a high degree the qualities that command success we cannot ex- 
pect to deserve it or to keep what it brings. (Applause.) Our 
future is in my opinion well assured from the very fact that 
there is this high degree of character in the average American 
citizen. (Applause.) I cannot over-emphasize the fact that law 
and the administration of the law can merely supplement and help 
to give full play to the forces that make the individual man a 
factor of usefulness in the community. If the individual citizen 
has not got the right stuff in him you cannot get it out of him, 
because it is not there to get out. (Applause.) No law that the 
wit of man has ever devised ever has made or ever will make the 
fool wise, the coward brave, or the weakling strong. (Cheers 
and applause.) When we get down to those places where you 
see humanity in the raw then it is the native strength of the man 
that will count more than aught else; and we cannot afford in 
this community ever to weaken the spirit of individual initiative, 
ever to make any man believe that if he cannot walk himself 
somehow the law can carry him. It cannot, (Applause.) There 
is but one real way in which any man can be helped, and that is 
by teaching him to help himself. (Applause.) 

Remember that the factor of the sum of the individual's own 
qualities comes first. With that admitted, with that kept in mind, 
it is then true that something, and oftentimes a good deal, can 
be done by wise legislation and by upright, honest and fearless 
enforcement of the laws, an enforcement of the laws which must 
and shall know no respect of persons — (applause) laws local, 
laws State, laws national. We have attained our present posi- 
tion of economic well-being, of economic leadership in the inter- 

[8i] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



national business world under a tariff policy in which I think 
our people as a whole have acquiesced as essentially wise alike 
from the standpoint of the manufacturer, the merchant, the 
farmer, and the wageworker. Doubtless as our needs shift it will 
be necessary to reapply in its details this system so as to meet 
those shifting needs ; but it would certainly seem from the stand- 
point of our business interests — and such a question, primarily 
a business question, should be approached only from the stand- 
point of our business interests — it would seem most unwise to 
abandon the general policy of the system under which our success 
has been so signal. 

In financial matters we are to be congratulated upon having 
definitely determined that our currency system must rest upon 
a gold basis (applause), for to follow any other course would have 
meant disaster so widespread that it would be difficult to over- 
estimate it. There is, however, unquestionably need of enacting 
further financial legislation so as to provide for greater elasticity 
in our currency system. (Applause.) At present there are certain 
seasons during which the rigidity of this system causes a strin- 
gency most unfortunate in its effects. The last Congress in its 
wisdom took up and disposed of various matters of vital moment ; 
such as those dealing with the regulation and supervision of the 
great corporations commonly known as trusts, with securing in 
effective fashion the abolition of rebates by transportation com- 
panies, that is with securing fair play as between the big man and 
the little man in getting their products to market (applause), 
and in initiating the national system of irrigation. So in my 
judgment the Congress that is to assemble next fall should take 
up and dispose of the pressing questions relating to banking and 
currency. I believe that such action will be taken, and I am sure 
that it ought to be taken. (Applause.) It is needed in the interest 
of the business world and it is needed even more in the interest 
in the world of producers, of earth tillers, of men who make their 
living by the products of the farm and ranch. Such action would 
supplement in fitting style the excellent work that has already 

[8a] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



been done in recent years in regard to our monetary system. 
There always will be need of wise legislation and an even greater 
need of the wisdom which recognizes when the wisest policy is 
to have no legislation; and it is of prime importance to us to 
remember that we cannot afford to condone in public life any 
deviation from the principles of common sense and of rugged 
honesty which we deem essential in private and business life. 
(Applause.) 

There is no royal road to good government. Good government 
comes to the nation the bulk of whose people show in their re- 
lations to that government the humdrum, ordinary, work-a-day 
virtues, and it comes and can come upon no other condition. We 
need the best intellectual skill, we need the most thorough train- 
ing in public life, but such skill and such training can be only 
supplementary to and in some sense substitutes for the fundamen- 
tal virtues that have marked every great and prosperous nation 
since the dim years when history dawned, the fundamental virtues 
of decency, honesty, courage, hardihood ; the spirit of fair dealing 
as between man and man, the spirit that dares, that foresees, that 
endures, that triumphs; and added to all those qualities, the sav- 
ing grace of common sense. (Cheers and applause.) 



[83] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT THE HALL OF THE NATIVE 
SONS OF THE GOLDEN WEST, SAN 
FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, IN RE- 
SPONSE TO GREETINGS FROM THE 
ASSOCIATION OF PIONEERS, MEXI- 
CAN WAR VETERANS, NATIVE SONS 
OF THE GOLDEN WEST, AND NATIVE 
DAUGHTERS OF THE GOLDEN WEST 

May ij, 190J 

Mr. Chairman, Mrs. Keith, and You Who Have Greeted Me 
Today : 

I thank you, men and women of the Golden State. I thank 
you not merely for the greeting you have given me today, but 
through you I thank your State for the week I have spent within 
her borders. I trust I came within them a fairly good American, 
and I leave them a better American. (Applause.) 

I am deeply touched by the beautiful gift you have given me, 
and you see this shows that even a President can be a successful 
bear hunter. (Laughter and applause.) I had begun to think 
that my acquaintance with that noble animal must cease. 

Mr. Phelan, you pleased and touched me very much by what 
you said as to my feeling toward the pioneers. Of course I am 
glad to be welcomed by you, for you, the men of '49, the men 
of the Mexican War, you have done what I preach, and practice 
is always better than preaching. I should be sorry indeed if there 
were not societies like those of the Native Sons and Native 
Daughters in this State to keep alive the sense of historic con- 
tinuity with the State's mighty past. (Applause.) I have wel- 
comed the sight of the feeling which has made the people of this 

[84] 



?d 




BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



State wish to preserve the ancient landmarks, landmarks of man 
and landmarks of nature, and which has made them desirous of 
keeping alive the memory of the great deeds and great doers, 
which gave the State to the Union. 

Proud of your State? Of course you are proud of your State. 
How could you help being? I do not praise you for being proud 
of your State. I would be ashamed of you if you were not. 

It is sometimes difficult for us fully to realize what has been 
done. Colonel, you and your fellow-veterans took part in a war 
which in its effects dwarfed into insignificance all the struggles 
of contemporary Europe. It often happens that at the time being 
two great contests are seen entirely out of perspective, that the 
real importance of them is shrouded from the eyes that look on 
at the moment, so that at the time of the decay of the Roman 
empire the struggles of the rival claimants for the throne of the 
Caesars seemed all-important to the people on the shores of the 
Mediterranean, but now we forget even the names of those under 
whose banners the rival factions fought, while for all time deeply 
imprinted in history are the deeds of the men, the barbarians, 
who came from the north and who founded France, England, 
Lombardy and Spain as we know them today, those deeds were 
of lasting consequence, but we have forgotten what the others 
fought about, so now no one cares to try to disentangle the cause 
of the wars between the successors to the empire of Alexander 
for the fragments of his monarchy, but the issue of the struggle 
between Rome and Carthage was big with the fate of the world. 
Here on this continent while great European nations spent their 
blood and their treasure in devastating warfare for tiny provinces, 
it was given to this people to wage war against man, to wage 
war against nature, for the possession of the vast, lonely spaces 
of the earth which we have now made the seat of a mighty civili- 
zation. (Applause.) Why, Colonel, you and your fellows, you 
and the men who came here as pioneers, settled the destiny of half 
a continent and ultimately settled the destiny of the greatest of 
all the oceans. (Applause.) 

[85] 



C A'L IFORNIA ADDRESSES 



Great were your feats; great the deeds you did; you did them 
in iron times; and you could have done them only on condition 
of having iron in your blood, of having within you the spirit that 
drives a man onward over obstacles, over difficulties, that makes 
him refuse to be daunted, and out of failure through effort win 
ultimate success. (Applause.) The days have changed. The 
pioneer days have gone, but the need for the old pioneer virtues 
remains as great as ever. (Applause.) In every generation we 
see people who treat the mighty deeds of the fathers as an excuse 
for failing to do all that should be done themselves. It is there- 
fore the duty of those of each generation who appreciate to the 
full what the work of the fathers meant, to keep alive the mem- 
ory of that work as a spur to ever fresh effort on their part. 
(Applause.) For that reason I hail with especial pleasure the ex- 
istence of such societies as those which seek to band together the 
young men and young women native born to this State and seek 
to keep alive in them the spirit which will make them in their 
turn do mighty works, mighty deeds, of which their children shall 
be proud. (Applause.) 

We are proud of you. We are proud of the men of the war of 
*46, of the men of '49, because in 1846 and in 1849 you did not hold 
the fact that your fathers had done well in 1876 as an excuse for 
your doing nothing. (Applause.) And we, if we expect our chil- 
dren to be proud of us and not to have to skip a generation in or- 
der to have cause to be proud, if we expect them to be proud of 
us, we must in our turn try to do to the best of our capacity the 
deeds ready at hand ; try to grapple with the work that the nation 
finds to be done without its boundaries and within, the work of 
civic and municipal administration, the work of endeavoring to 
better our social as well as our political system, the work of striv- 
ing to make more real, more part of our lives in practice, the 
principles of brotherhood to which we all in the abstract pay 
our homage, and also of keeping up our work as a people without 
our boundaries. As the Colonel said, this was the boundary. It 
is not. Sail westward and westward and you will find that the 

[86] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



boundary has gone. San Francisco is not on the westernmost 
verge of our possessions. Run down the lines of longitude and 
you will find that it is in the exact center. (Applause.) 

I ask then, men and women of this great and beautiful State, 
this wonderful State, that you, that all of us approach our duties 
of today in the spirit that our fathers have shown in the different 
crises of the past, that we approach them realizing that nothing 
can take the place of the ordinary, everyday performance of duty, 
that we need the virtues which do not wait for heroic times, but 
which are exercised day in and day out in the ordinary work, the 
ordinary duty of the life domestic, the life social, the life in 
reference to the State ; and if we show those qualities, if we show 
the qualities that make for good citizenship, for decency and 
civic righteousness in ordinary times, my faith is firm that when 
the need for the heroic efforts arises our people will in the future 
as they have always done in the past show that they have the 
capacity for heroic work. (Great applause.) 



[87] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT THE CEREMONIES, INCI- 
DENT TO THE BREAKING OF SOD 
FOR THE ERECTION OF A MONU- 
MENT IN MEMORY OF THE LATE 

PRESIDENT Mckinley, at san 

FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 

May 13, 1903 

Friends and Fellow- Americans : 

It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for 
the monument to commemorate President McKinley should be 
turned in the presence of his old comrades of the great war, and 
in the presence of the men who, in a lesser war, strove to show 
that they were not wholly unworthy of those who in the dark 
years from '61 to '65 proved their truth by their endeavor; and 
with the blood cemented the foundation of the American Repub- 
lic. (Applause.) It is a solemn thing to speak in memory of a 
man who, when young, went to war for the honor and the life 
of the nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on 
the march, in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and 
to whom it was given in after life to show himself exemplary in 
public and in private conduct, to become the ideal of the nation 
in peace as he had been a typical representative of the nation's 
young sons in war. (Applause.) 

It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as 
widely and as universally beloved in this country as was Presi- 
dent McKinley. (Applause.) For it was given to him not only 
to rise to the most exalted station but to typify in his character 
and conduct those virtues which any citizen worthy of the name 
likes to regard as typically American; to typify the virtues of 
cleanly and upright living in all relations, private and public, as 

[gg] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of business, 
in the relations with his neighbors, and finally, in his conduct of 
the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to 
do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has 
ever befallen this nation to settle since it became a nation — the 
problem of the preservation of the Union and the abolition 
of slavery — exactly as it was his good fortune to do his 
part as a man should in his youth in settling that great 
problem, so it was his good fortune when he became in fact and 
in name the nation's chief, the nation's titular and the nation's 
real chief, to settle the problems springing out of the Spanish 
War; problems less important only than those which were dealt 
with by the men who, under the lead of Washington, founded 
our government, and the men who, upholding the statesmanship 
of Lincoln and following the sword of Grant, or Sherman, or 
Thomas or Sheridan saved and perpetuated the Republic. (Ap- 
plause.) 

When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all 
honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable, 
and was pressed upon him, he met it as he and you had met the 
crisis of 1861. He did his best to prevent the war coming; once 
it became evident that it had to come then he did his best to see 
that it was ended as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. (Ap- 
plause.) It is a good lesson for nations and individuals to learn 
never to hit if it can be helped and never to hit soft. (Laughter 
and applause.) I think it is getting to be fairly understood that 
that is our foreign policy. We do not want to threaten ; certainly 
we do not desire to wrong any man ; we are going to keep out of 
trouble if we possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary 
for our honor and our interest to assert a given position we shall 
assert it with every intention of making the assertion good. 
(Cheers and applause.) 

The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the 
Philippines, and it was natural that this State within whose bor- 
ders live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the 

[89] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



great war — it was natural that this State should find its sons 
eagerly volunteering for the chance to prove their truth in the 
war that came in their days ; and it was to be expected that Cali- 
fornia's sons should do well, as they did do well, in the Philip- 
pines in the new contest. (Applause.) 

And now it is eminently fitting that the men of the great war 
and the men of the lesser war claiming not only to have been 
good soldiers but to be good citizens should come here to assist 
at laying the foundation of the monument to him who typified 
in his career the virtues of the soldier and exemplified in his high 
office our ideals of good citizenship. I am glad that a monument 
should have been erected here in this wonderful State on the 
shores of the Pacific; in this city with a great past and with a 
future so great that the most sanguine among us cannot properly 
estimate it; this city, the city of the Occident which looks west 
to the Orient across the Pacific, westward to the West that is the 
hoary East; this city situated upon that giant ocean which will 
in a not distant future be commercially the most important body 
of water in the entire world. 

I have enjoyed coming into your State; coming into your city, 
and speaking to an audience like this, an audience composed so 
largely of volunteer soldiers, old and young. I wish to say how 
I have enjoyed seeing, and to-day reviewing, the officers and en- 
listed men of the army and navy of the United States — the reg- 
ulars. Thank Heaven ! the day is long past when the thought of 
any rivalry save that of honest and generous emulation in the 
service of the Republic could exist between regular and volun- 
teer. (Cheers and applause.) Need I say between regular and 
volunteer? Why, the regulars are all volunteers. In our country 
every officer, every enlisted man, in the navy or the army is these 
because he has volunteered to go in. And as I looked at the faces 
of the officers and men under General MacArthur and Admiral 
Glass I felt proud as Commander-in-Chief that they formed our 
army and navy and prouder as an American citizen to see such 



[90] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



American citizens wearing the uniform of Uncle Sam. (Ap- 
plause.) 

I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of 
joining with you today in these solemn ceremonies of commem- 
oration, the ceremonies of laying the foundation of the monument 
which is to keep green in mind the memory of McKinley as a 
lesson in war and a lesson in peace, as a lesson to all Americans 
of what can be done by the American who in good faith strives 
to do his whole duty by the mighty Republic. (Cheers and ap- 
plause.) 



[9'] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS ON BEING PRESENTED WITH 
A CANTEEN BY VARIOUS ORGANIZA- 
TIONS OF THE SPANISH WAR VET- 
ERANS, AT SAN FRANCISCO, CALI- 
FORNIA 

May 13, 1903 

My Fellow-Citizens: 

Now, comrades, I guess you do not wonder that I am fond of 
the men of my regiment. In receiving this beautiful canteen I 
want to say that I shall prize it even more than the old one, and 
all of us know how we prize the old one. I want to thank you 
and my comrades of the Spanish- American War from my heart; 
and I do not have to say to you of the old war that there is no 
other bond that can unite men quite so closely together as the 
bond of having in actual service drunk out of the same canteen. 
(Applause.) 

I want to say to you a word about Mr. King. The only time 
I ever saw him nervous was just now. He was not only a first- 
class soldier, but I am sure that all of you will understand me 
when I say that in the field he was also a first-class cook. I shall 
never forget one day right after the San Juan fight when I had 
lived sumptuously for thirty-six hours on two hardtacks. Comrade 
King, somehow or other, had evolved the ingredients of a first- 
class stew, and with an affection which was mighty real in its 
results to me at that moment, brought some of it to me. And I 
have never tasted, not even at the wonderful banquet that I have 
attended in San Francisco, anything quite so good. 

I have four comrades in this city and I had almost to break 
their hearts yesterday in the interests of the chief there by re- 
fusing to have them act as my escort in the procession. It is 

[9»] 





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1- -^ 






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cm: 


m i 






■ ^ 


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* - 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



such a pleasure to sec them here and to see all my com- 
rades of the Spanish War. None of the men of my own genera- 
tion or of this younger, stand as close to me as you of my regi- 
ment, as the men of the Spanish War do, and I know you younger 
ones will not object to my saying that there are some that stand 
even closer, because we join in doffing our hats to them, the men 
of the great war, our examples in all that we strove to do. (Cheers 
and applause.) 



[93] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT MECHANICS' PAVILION, 
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 

May ij, 1903 

Mr. Chairman, and You, Men and Women of San Francisco,. 
OF California: 

I should be indeed unappreciative if I were not deeply stirred 
by the greeting I have received in your State, in your city, and 
especially by this audience tonight. (Applause.) It has been a 
great pleasure to come into wonderful and beautiful California,. 
to see the State itself, but most of all the citizens of the State. 
Today I have been especially pleased and struck by the greeting 
of the children. (Applause.) You know I believe in children; 
and I was not only glad to see the kind of children you had, but 
also how many you had. (Laughter.) And above all, I have been 
pleased this evening driving through the streets to be greeted by 
the children of the night schools and their teachers. 

I have in New York a very dear friend named Jacob Riis (ap- 
plause) — (let any one that will applaud him, for they ought to), — 
who has written and taught by precept and practice that each one 
of us ought to be his brother's keeper when the chance arises, and 
who has devoted himself particularly to the welfare of the chil- 
dren, and especially to those children to whom life does not come 
too easily and to those who have to strive for their education at 
the same time that they are earning their living, and to whom the 
education is bound to be of ten-fold more value because it is 
acquired as things worth acquiring generally must be acquired 
— by effort and self-sacrifice. (Applause.) 

I have come from the Atlantic across this continent to the 
Pacific. I have greeted many audiences. I see a little diversity, 
but, oh my fellow-citizens, what strikes me most and pleases me 
most is the fundamental unity, is the fact that wherever I go I 

[94] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



speak to an audience of Americans, be they East or be they West. 
(Cheers and applause.) And I make the same appeal with the 
same confidence here beside the Gk)lden Gate that I should make 
by the Great Lakes or in the upper Mississippi Valley or on the 
Atlantic Ocean. This is a government of freemen, who have 
achieved liberty under the law, who have, by force of arms as well 
as by legislation, established once for all as the fundamental prin- 
ciple of our government that there shall not in this country be 
license; that there shall not be in this country liberty to oppress 
without the law; that liberty and freedom shall come under and 
in pursuance of the law, of the law that is no respecter of per- 
sons, under a government that is a government neither for the 
rich man as such nor for the poor man as such, but for every 
man, rich or poor, if he is a decent man and does his duty to the 
State. (Cheers and applause.) 

Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist (ap- 
plause), and after having been here I fail to understand how any 
man convinced of his country's greatness and glad that his 
country should challenge with proud confidence its mighty future, 
can be anything but an expansionist. (Applause.) In the century 
that is opening, the commerce and the command of the Pacific 
will be factors of incalculable moment in the world's history. 

The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to 
sea. The earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile and 
in Mesopotamia had little to do with sea traffic. But with the 
rise of those people who went down to the sea in ships, with the 
rise of the Phoenicians, the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Medi- 
terranean became the central sea on whose borders lay the great 
wealthy and cultivated powers of antiquity. The war navies and 
the merchant marines of Carthage, Greece and Rome strove there- 
on for military and industrial supremacy. Its control was the 
prerequisite to greatness, and the Roman became lord of the 
Western world only when his fleet rode unchallenged from the 
Aegean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then Rome fell. But for 
centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of Europe were 

[95] 



^ 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



centered on its southern shores, and the control of the Mediter- 
ranean was vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was 
at this time that Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur 
and their might. 

But gradually the nations of the North grew beyond barbarism, 
and developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, 
the Baltic, the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become 
independent or else to become props of mighty civilized nations. 
The seafaring merchants ventured with ever greater boldness 
into the Atlantic. The cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the 
Hansa, grew and flourished as once the Italian cities had grown. 
Holland and England, Spain, Portugal and France sent forth 
mercantile adventurers to strive for fame and profit on the high 
seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled, America was dis- 
covered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater modern 
world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of 
antiquity. 

Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the great- 
est of all the oceans, of all the seas, and the last to be used on 
a large scale by civilized man bids fair to become in its turn the 
first in point of importance. (Applause.) The empire that shifted 
from the Mediterranean will in the lifetime of those now chil- 
dren bid fair to shift once more westward to the Pacific. When the 
19th century opened the lonely keels of a few whale ships, a few 
merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast expanse of the Pa- 
cific ; but as a whole its islands and its shores were not materially 
changed from what they had been in the long past ages when the 
Phoenician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the ivory of 
Lybia, the treasures of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient still 
crept between China and Japan and Farther India, and from the 
woody wilderness which shrouded the western shores of our 
own continent the red lords '^f the land looked forth upon a 
waste of waters which only their own canoes traversed. That 
was but a century ago ; and now, at the opening of the 20th cen- 
tury, the change is so vast that it is well-nigh impossible for us 

[96] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



to estimate its importance. In the South Seas the great common- 
wealth of Austraha has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the 
lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern 
powers. European nations have seated themselves along the 
eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given 
us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a 
nation at all, if at the same time both rich and defenseless 

Meanwhile our own mighty republic has stretched from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Wash- 
ington, in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of 
coast line which makes it of necessity a power of the first class 
in the Pacific. The extension in the area of our domain has 
been immense, the extension in the area of our influence even 
greater. America's geographical position on the Pacific is such 
as to insure our peaceful domination of its waters in the future 
if only we grasp with sufficient resolution the advantages of that 
position. We are taking long strides in that direction; witness 
the cables we are laying down, the steamship lines we are start- 
ing—some of them already containing steamships larger than 
any freight carriers that have previously existed. We have taken 
the first steps toward digging an Isthmian Canal, to be under 
our own control (applause), a canal which will make our At- 
lantic and Pacific coast lines in effect continuous, which will be 
of incalculable benefit to our mercantile navy, and above all to 
our military navy in the event of war. 

The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the 
Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without 
irreverence be called Providential. Unless we show ourselves 
weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from 
whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have 
undertaken. (Applause.) I most earnestly hope that this work 
will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely desire peace, 
and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not 
afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and fairness 
with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest that 

[97] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



we are able to maintain our rights. Such showing cannot be 
made by bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us 
speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and 
ready. If we do these things we can count on the peace that 
comes to the just man armed, to the just man who neither fears 
nor inflicts wrong. We must keep on building and maintaining 
a thoroughly efficient navy, with plenty of the best and most 
formidable ships, with an ample supply of officers and men, and 
with those officers and men trained in the most efficient fashion 
to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure our position 
in the world at large. It behooves all men of lofty soul fit and 
proud to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep our 
position in the world; for our proper place is with the great ex- 
panding peoples, with the peoples that dare to be great, that ac- 
cept with confidence a place of leadership in the world. All our 
people should take that position, but especially you of California, 
you of the Pacific Slope, for much of our expansion must go 
through the Golden Gate. (Applause.) And inevitably you who 
are seated by the Pacific must take the lead in and must profit 
by the growth of American influence along the coasts and among 
the islands of that mighty ocean, where East and West finally be- 
come one. 

My countrymen, I believe in you with all my heart. I am proud 
that it has been granted to me to be a citizen in a nation of such 
glorious opportunities, with the wisdom, the hardihood, and the 
courage to take advantage of them. We have no choice, we 
people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play 
a great part in the world. That has been determined for us by 
fate, by the march of events. We have to play that part. All that 
we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill. (Applause.) 
We are not and cannot and never will be one of those nations that 
can progress from century to century doing little and suffering 
little, standing aside from the great world currents. We must 
either succeed greatly or fail greatly. The citizen of a small na- 
tion may keep his self-respect if that nation plays but a small 

C 98 1 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



part in the world, because it is physically impossible for the 
nation to do otherwise; but the citizen of a great nation which 
plays a small part should hang his head with shame. (Cheers and 
applause.) 

I do not preach to this country the life of ease, any more than 
I should preach it to any man worth his salt living in the country. 
The citizen that counts, the man that counts in our life is the man 
who endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and overcome 
them (applause) ; is the man who endeavors not to lead his life 
in the world's soft places, not to walk easily and take his com- 
fort; but the man who goes out to tread the rugged ways that 
lead to honor and success, the ways the treading of which means 
good v/ork worthily done. (Applause.) 

What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the 
right view, does not wish to see his or her children grow up 
trained, not to flinch but to overcome, trained not to avoid what- 
ever is hard and rough and difficult, but to go down into the hurly 
burly of actual life and win glory in the arena, heedless of the 
dust and the sweat and blood of the contest. 

You men of the West, the older among you, came here, hewed 
out your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are 
the heirs of the men who did this, and you cannot, unless you are 
false to your blood, desire to see the nation, which is but the 
aggregate of the individuals act otherwise than in the way which 
you esteem as honorable for the individual. 

Our place as a nation is and must be with the nations that 
have left indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell 
you that the great expanding nations of antiquity have passed 
away. So they have; and so have all others. Those that did 
not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory be- 
hind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but 
the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his 
masterful ability in administration, deep in the world's history, 
deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after 
him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its 

[99] 



LofC.^ 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path. In 
1861 the easiest thing for each man to do was to stay at home, 
and let the Union be broken up. That was the easy thing to do, 
and thank Heaven for the iron in the blood of our fathers, thank 
Heaven tor the souls within them, that made the easy thing im- 
possible to do. (Applause.) 

Mighty Lincoln, sad, patient Lincoln, called, and the young 
men of the country sprang to arms and answered his call, and 
the nation, the Republic, the peaceful Republic of the West, 
until then the incarnate genius of peace, sprang to her feet with 
sword and shield, a helmeted queen among nations. Our people 
went to the war. The women cheered them on, the women whose 
task was harder than the task of the husbands, of the lovers, of 
the fathers, of the sons they sent to battle. For four years they 
fought until the ultimate triumph came to crown the effort, the 
long weary months of waiting and disappointment, the bitter hours 
of failure, the anguish of defeat — the triumphs came, and those 
men of *6i, the men who wore the blue, left us a reunited country 
and the right of brotherhood with the sons of the men who wore 
the gray. (Cheers and applause.) So that now every American can 
glory alike in the valiant deeds done by all Americans, Northern 
or Southern, who in that great hour of strife did their duty as 
the light was given them severally to see that duty. (Applause.) 

If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been 
content to say: "Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union 
were kept, but we are not willing to pay the price in blood and 
effort of keeping it;" if they had done that there is not a man 
or woman in this hall who would now walk with head erect, who 
would now have the right to feel as we have the right to feel 
that we challenge equality with the citizens of the proudest 
country that the world has yet seen. I ask that this generation 
and future generations strive in the spirit of those who strove 
to found the Republic, of those who strove to save and perpetuate 
it. I ask that this nation shape its policy in a spirit of justice 
toward all and a spirit of resolute endeavor to accept each duty 

[100] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



as the duty comes, and to rest ill-content until that duty is done. 
I ask that we meet the many problems with which we are con- 
fronted from without and from within, not in the spirit that seeks 
to purchase present peace by the certainty of future disaster, but 
with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to make of this na- 
tion in the end, as the centuries go by, the example for all the 
nations of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we shall 
see the spirit of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also 
we shall see incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the 
spirit which while refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of 
flinching from any fear of the strong. (Cheers and applause.) 



[,oi] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT DEDICATION OF NAVY 
MEMORIAL MONUMENT, SAN FRAN- 
CISCO CALIFORNIA 



CISCO, CALIFORNIA 

May 14, 1903 



Mr. Mayor, My Fellow- Citizens, Men and Women of San 
Francisco : 

The ground for this monument was first turned by President 
McKinley (applause), and I am glad to have the chance of say- 
ing a few words in dedication of the completed monument. There 
is no branch of our government in which all our people are so 
deeply interested as the navy of the United States. (Applause.) 
It is not merely San Francisco, not merely New York, or Boston, 
or Charleston, or New Orleans, not merely the seacoast cities of 
the nation ; every individual in the nation who is proud of 
America and jealous of her good name must feel a thrill of gen- 
erous emotion at the erection of a monument to the navy, a mon- 
ument to the fleet which was victorious under Admiral Dewey 
on the first of May, five years ago, a fleet which then added a new 
page to the long honor roll of American achievement. (Applause.) 
It is eminently fitting that there should be here in this great city 
on the Pacific Ocean a monument to commemorate the deed 
which showed once for all that America had taken her position 
on the Pacific. I want you all to draw a practical lesson from 
this commemoration. We today dedicate this monument because 
those who went before us had the wisdom to make ready for 
the victory. If we wish our children to have the chance of 
dedicating monuments of this kind in the event of war we must 
see that theinavy is made ready in advance. (Applause.) To dedi- 
cate the monument would be an empty and foolish thing if we 
accompanied it by an abandonment of our national policy of 
building up the navy. (Applause.) And good though it is to erect 

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BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



this monument, it is better still to go on with the building up of 
the navy which gave the monument to us, and which, if we ever 
give it a fair chance, can be relied upon to rise level to our needs. 
(Applause.) 

Remember that after the war has begun it is too late to im- 
provise a navy. A naval war is two-thirds settled in advance, 
at least two-thirds, because it is mainly settled by the preparation 
which has gone on for years preceding its outbreak. We won at 
Manila because the shipbuilders of the country, including those 
here at San Francisco, under the wise provisions of Congress, 
had for fifteen years before been preparing the navy. In 1882 
our navy was a shame and a disgrace to the country in point of 
material. The personnel contained as fine material as there was 
to be found in the world, but the ships and the guns were' as 
antiquated as if they had been the galleys of Alcibiades, and it 
would have been a wicked absurdity to have sent them against 
the ships of any great power. Then we began to build up the 
navy. Every ship that fought under Dewey had been built be- 
tween 1883 and 1898. We come here as patriots remembering 
that our party lines stop at the water's edge. That fleet was suc- 
cessful in 1898 because under the previous administrations of both 
political parties, under the previous Congress controlled by both 
political parties for the previous fifteen years, there had been a 
resolute effort to build adequate ships and see that they were 
practiced. The ships that went in under Dewey had been con 
structed under different successive Secretaries of the Navy, and 
had been provided for by different successive Congresses of the 
United States. Not one of them had been built less than two 
years, some of them fourteen years. We could not have begun 
to fight that battle if we had not been for so many years making 
ready the navy. 

The last Congress has taken greater strides than any previous 
Congress in making ready the navy, but it will be two or three 
years before the effects are seen. In no branch of the government 
is foresight ind the carrying out of a steady and continuous pel- 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



icy so necessary as in the navy; and you, citizens of San Fran- 
cisco, of California, and all our citizens should make it a matter 
of prime duty to see that there is no halt in that work, that the 
next Congress, and the Congress after that, and the Congress 
after that, go right on with providing formidable warcraft whose 
hammering guns beat out destiny on the high seas, with provid- 
ing the officers, with providing the men, and with providing the 
means of training them in peace to be effective in war. The best 
ships and the best guns do not count unless they are handled 
aright and aimed aright, and the best men cannot thus handle 
the one nor aim the other if they do not have ample practice. 
Our people must be trained in handling our ships in squadrons 
on the high seas. Our people on the ships must be trained by 
actual practice to do their duty in conning tower, in the engine 
rooms, in the gun turrets. The shots that count in battle are the 
shots that hit, and only those. (Applause.) 

We have reason to be satisfied with the rapid increase in ac- 
curacy in marksmanship of the navy in recent years, and I con- 
gratulate Admiral Glass and those under him and all our naval 
officers who are taking their part so well in perfecting that work, 
and I congratulate the enlisted men of the navy upon the extraor- 
dinary improvement in marksmanship shown by the gun pointers. 
(Applause.) 

Applaud the navy and what it has done. That is first-class. 
But make your applause count by seeing that the good work goes 
on. Besides applauding now see to it that the navy is so built 
up that the men of the next generation will have something to 
applaud also. (Cheers and applause.) 



[104] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

ADDRESS AT 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 

May 14, 190} 

President Wheeler, Fellow-Members of the University: 
(Applause.) 

Last night, in speaking to one of my new friends in California, 
he told me that he thought enough had been said to me about 
the fruits and flowers; that enough had been said to me about 
California being an Eden, and that he wished I would pay some 
attention to Adam as well. Much though I have been interested 
in the wonderful physical beauty of this wonderful State, I have 
been infinitely more interested in its citizenship, and perhaps most 
in its citizenship, in the making. 

When I come to the University of California and am greeted 
by its President I am greeted by an old and valued friend, a friend 
whom I have not merely known socially but upon whom, while 
I was Governor of New York, I leaned often for advice and as- 
sistance in the problems with which I had to deal. (Applause.) 
And when he accepted your offer I grudged him to you. (Ap- 
plause.) And it was not until I came here, not until I have seen 
you, that I have been fully reconciled to the loss. But now I am, 
for I can conceive of no happier life for any man to lead to whom 
life means what it should mean, than the life of the President of 
this great University. (Applause.) 

This same friend last night suggested to me a thought that 
I intend to work out in speaking to you today. We were talking 
over the University of California, and from that we spoke of the 
general educational system of our country. Facts tend to become 
commonplace, and we tend to lose sight of their importance when 
once they become ingrained into the life of the nation. Although 

[105] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



we talk a good deal about what the widespread education of this 
country means, I question if many of us deeply consider its mean- 
ing. From the lowest grade of the public school to the highest 
form of university training, education in this country is at the 
disposal of every man, every woman, who chooses to work for 
and obtain it. The State has done much, very much; witness this 
university. Private benefaction has done much, very much; wit- 
ness also this university. (Applause.) And each one of us who has 
obtained an education has obtained something for which he or 
she has not personally paid. No matter what the school, what 
the university, every American who has a school training, a uni- 
versity training, has obtained something given to him outright 
by the State, or given to him by those dead or those living who 
were able to make provision for that training because of the 
protection of the State, because of existence within its borders. 
Each one of us then who has an education, school or college, has 
obtained something from the community at large for which he or 
she has not paid, and no self-respecting man or woman is content 
to rest permanently under such an obligation. Where the State 
has bestowed education the man who accepts it must be content 
to accept it merely as a charity unless he returns it to the State 
in full, in the shape of good citizenship. (Applause.) I do not 
ask of you, men and women here today, good citizenship as a 
favor to the State. I demand it of you as a right, and hold you 
recreant to your duty if you fail to give it. (Applause.) 

Here you are in this university, in this State with its won- 
derful climate, which is going to permit to people of a Northern 
stock for the first time in the history of that Northern stock to 
gain education under physical circumstances, in physical sur- 
roundings, somewhat akin to those which surrounded the early 
Greeks. Here you have all those advantages and you are not 
to be excused if you do not show in tangible fashion your ap- 
preciation of them and your power to give practical effect to that 
appreciation. From all our citizens we have a right to expect 
good citizenship; but most of all from those who have received 

[io6] 



1, 




EJ ,■ 





Dedicating Monument, Union Square May i4> i9°3- Erpxted 

BY THE Citizens of San Francisco to Commemorate the 

Victory of the AMERrcAN Navy at Manila Bay, 

May I, 1898. 



On May 23, 1901, the Ground for This Monument was Broken 
BY President William McKinley. 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



most ; most of all from those who have had the training of body, 
of mind, of soul, which comes from association in and with a 
great university. To those to whom much has been given we 
have Biblical authority to expect and demand much in return; 
and the most that can be given to any man is education. I ex- 
pect and demand in the name of the nation much more from you 
who have had training- of the mind than from those of mere 
wealth. To the man of means much has been given, too, and 
much will be expected from him, and ought to be, but not as 
much as from you, because your possession is more valuable than 
his. (Applause.) If you envy him I think poorly of you. (Ap- 
plause.) Envy is merely the meanest form of admiration, and a 
man who envies another admits thereby his own inferiority. We 
have a right to expect from the college bred man, the college bred 
woman, a proper sense of proportion, a proper sense of perspec- 
tive, which will enable him or her to see things in their right re- 
lation one to another, and when thus seen while wealth will have 
a proper place, a just place, as an instrument for achieving happi- 
ness and power, for conferring happiness and power, it will not 
stand as high as much else in our national life. I ask you to take 
that not as a conventional statement from the university platform, 
but to test it by thinking of the men whom you admire in our 
past history and seeing what are the qualities which have made 
you admire them, what are the services they have rendered. For 
as President Wheeler said today, it is true now as it ever has been 
true that the greatest good fortune, the greatest honor, that can 
befall any man is that he shall serve, that he shall serve the na- 
tion, serve his people, serve mankind ; and looking back in history 
the names that come up before us, the names to which we turn, 
the names of the men of our own people which stand as shining 
honor marks m our annals, the names of those men typifying 
qualities which rightly we should hold in reverence, are the names 
of the statesmen, of the soldiers, of the poets— the architects of 
our material prosperity also, but only also. (Applause.) 

Of recent years I have been thrown in contact with a number 

[107] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



of college graduates doing good service to the country, and as 
I wish to make it perfectly evident what I mean by the kind of 
service which I should hope to have from you and which it seems 
to me worth while to render, I want to say just a word about two 
college graduates who have during the last five years rendered 
and are now rendering such services: Governor Taft in the 
Philippines, and Brigadier-General Leonard Wood, lately Gover- 
nor of Cuba. (Applause.) When we acquired the Philippines and 
took possession for the time being of Cuba to train its people in 
citizenship, we assumed heavy responsibilities ; so heavy that some 
very excellent people thought we ought to shirk them. I hold 
that a great and masterful people forfeits its title to greatness if 
it shirks any work because that work is difficult and responsible. 
(Applause.) The difficulty and responsibility impose upon us 
the high duty of doing the work well, but they in no way ex- 
cuse us for refusing to do it. We had to do the work and the 
question came of the choice of instruments in doing it. The 
most important and most difficult task after the establishment of 
order by the army in the Philippines was the establishment of 
civil government therein; and second only in importance to 
that came the administration of Cuba, during the three years 
and over that elapsed before we were able to turn its govern- 
ment over to its own people and start it as a free republic. 
When tasks are all-important the most important factor in doing 
them right is the choice of the agents; and among the many 
debts of gratitude which this nation owes to President Mc- 
Kinley (applause), no debt is greater than the debt we owe 
him for the choice of his instruments, such a choice as that of 
Taft, such a choice as that of Wood. (Applause.) We sent 
Taft to the Philippines; we sent Wood to Cuba; both of them 
as tested by the standard of our commercial life, poor men; 
each man with little more than his salary to keep himself and 
his family; each man to handle millions upon millions of dollars, 
to have the power by mere conniving at what was improper to 
acquire untold wealth — and sent them knowing that we did not 

[io8] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ever have to consider whether such opportunities would be 
temptations toward them; sent them knowing that they had the 
ideals of the American college-bred man and that, therefore, we 
did not have to consider the chance of a possible temptation 
appealing to them. 

Taft has gone to the Philippines to stay there; not only for- 
feiting thereby the certainty of brilliant rise in his profession 
on the bench or at the bar here if he had stayed, but at imminent 
risk to his own health, because he felt that his duty as an Amer- 
ican made him go; that, as President McKinley told me of him, 
he had been drafted into the service of the country and he could 
not honorably refuse. (Applause.) We have seen in conse- 
quence the Philippine Islands administered by the American 
official who is at the head of the government and by his col- 
leagues in the interest primarily of their people, and seeking 
to obtain for the United States, for the dominant race, that 
spent its blood and its treasure in making firm and stable the 
government of those islands — seeking to obtain for that dominant 
race only the reward that comes from the consciousness of duty 
well done. (Applause.) Under Taft, by and through his ef- 
forts, not only have peace and material well-being come to those 
islands to a degree never before known in their recorded history, 
and to a degree infinitely greater than had ever been dreamed 
possible by those who knew them best, but more than that, a 
greater measure of self-government has been given to them 
than is now given to any other Asiatic people under alien rule, 
than to any other Asiatic people under their own rulers, save 
Japan alone. That is an achievement of the past five years 
which I hold to be absolutely unparalleled in history; and when 
the debit and credit side of our national life is finally made up 
a long stroke shall be put to the credit side for what has been 
done in the Philippines under Taft and his associates. 

In the same way Leonard Wood worked in Cuba. Put down 
there to do an absolutely new task, to take a people of a diflferent 
race, a different speech, a different creed, a people just emerging 

[109] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



from the hideous welter of a war, cruel and sanguinary, beyond 
what we in this fortunate country cannot readily conceive, to 
take a people down in the depths of poverty, in the depths of 
misery, just recovering trom suffering which it makes one shud- 
der to think of, a people untrained utterly and absolutely in 
self-government, and fit them for it; and he did it. For three 
years he worked. He established a school system as good as the 
best that we have in any of our States. He cleaned cities which 
had never been cleaned in their existence before. He secured 
absolute safety for life and property. He did the kind of gov- 
ernmental work which should be the undying honor of our people 
forever. And he came home to what? He came home to be 
thanked by a few, to be attacked by others — not to their credit — 
and to have as his real reward the sense that though his work 
had been done at pecuniary sacrifice to him, that though the 
demands upon him had been such as to eat into his private 
means, yet he had worthily and well done his duty as an Ameri- 
can citizen and reflected honor, fresh honor, upon the uniform 
of the United States army. (Applause.) 

I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as examples, simply as 
instances of what other men by the hundred have done, Amer- 
icans who have graduated from no college, Americans who 
have graduated from all our different colleges, and especially 
by practically all those Americans who have graduated from 
the two great typical American institutions of learning — West 
Point and Annapolis. Taft and Wood and their fellows are 
spending or have spent the best years of their prime in doing a 
work which means to them pecuniary loss, at the best a bare 
livelihood while they are doing it, and are doing it gladly because 
they realize the truth that the highest privilege that can be 
given to any man is the privilege of serving his country, his 
fellow-Americans. (Applause.) As I am speaking to an audi- 
ence with proper ideals, when I say that Taft and Wood have 
done all this service to their pecuniary loss, I am holding them 
up not for pity— for envy. The least mean form of envy is the 

[no] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



envy of the man who does such work as they do. Every one 
here, every man, every woman, should feel it incumbent upon 
him or her to welcome with joy the chance to render service 
to the country, service to our people at large, and to accept the 
rendering of the service as in itself ample repayment therefor. 
Do not misunderstand me. The average man, the average woman 
must earn his or her living in one way or another, and I most 
emphatically do not advise any one to decline to do the humdrum, 
everyday duties because there may come a chance for the display 
of heroism. Let me just tell you one anecdote, then I am 
through. When I raised my regiment prior to going to Cuba 
we had recruits from every portion of the country in it, some 
of them without a very clear idea of what was ahead of them. 
I had one young man, full of enthusiasm, who about the third 
day came to me and said: "Colonel, I came down here to fight 
for my country; they have treated me like a serf; they have 
put me to burying a dead horse." (Laughter.) At that moment 
his Captain, who was a large man from New Mexico, and not 
wholly sympathetic, came up and explained to him that he would 
go right on burying that dead horse and that the next task ahead 
of him was digging kitchen sinks; and if he did all that well 
we would attend to the hero business later. 

I ask of you the straightforward, earnest performance of duty 
in all the little things that come up day by day in business, in 
domestic life, in every way, and then when the opportunity comes, 
if you have thus done your duty in the lesser things, I know 
you will rise level to the heroic needs. (Cheers and applause.) 



[Ill] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA 

May 14, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and You, My Fellow- Citizens, Men and Women 
OF Oakland: 

It has been a great pleasure to come into your beautiful city 
(applause) ; and it could not but stir any man's heart to be 
greeted as you have greeted me, (Applause.) I am glad in- 
deed to see you, to see the men, the women, and the children. 
(Applause.) As I drove through your beautiful streets I passed 
by one house where there was a large family party assembled, 
and they had a strip of bunting and printed on it were the words : 
"No Race Suicide Here;" and I got up and bowed my acknowl- 
edgments and congratulations. I have been delighted, passing 
through your streets, to be greeted by the children. They seem 
all right in quality and all right in quantity. (Applause.) 

My fellow-citizens, I have enjoyed to the utmost my stay in 
California, my visits to its greatest cities ; I have appreciated your 
wonderful scenery, your wonderful climate," but most of all 
have I enjoyed meeting your men and women. It is a great 
thing to have such agricultural products, such industrial pros- 
perity, as I have seen here; but it is a greater thing to have the 
right type of citizenship. (Applause.) 

In thanking all of you for your greeting I am sure that the 
others will not mind my saying a special word of greeting to two 
sets of men — first of all to the service men of the Spanish-Amer- 
ican War. (Applause.) I came aboard to be ferried over your 
bay today on the dock from which the great majority of our 
soldiers went to the Philippines. I have seen by the shores of 
this bay the place where the Eighth Corps was assembled, the 
Eighth Corps which numbered successively almost a hundred 

[iia] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



thousand men, so many of whom came from your own Coast, 
your own State. As I saw my escort, the service men of the 
Spanish War, marching in the famiHar gray campaign hat, blue 
shirt, khaki trousers and leggings, I was glad that I had the 
right of comradeship with them (applause), and that I was one 
of those to whom by good fortune it was given to have the 
chance to show that at least we desired to do as the men of 
the great war had done from '6i to '65. Wherever I have been 
in California I have been greeted by men who wear the button 
that shows that, like the chief executive of this city, in the 
times that tried men's souls they were true to their ideals. (Ap- 
plause.) Now I greet you here. I have not got much to say to 
you, because since I have been in California I have felt a good 
deal more like learning than teaching; indeed, my fellow-citizens, 
there have been moments when I have felt that the only thing 
that marred my visit was the fact that I had to speak. But 
I am glad to say just this word to you, to greet you, to express 
the pleasure it has been to me to come here, and finally to say 
this: I have come from the Atlantic across the continent to the 
Pacific; I have come from the East through the West, beyond 
the West, to California (applause) ; for California stands by 
itself; and from one end of this country to the other, address- 
ing any audience, I have felt absolutely at home ; I have felt that 
I was speaking to men and women who felt as I did and thought 
as I did, to whom I could appeal with the certainty of being 
understood; because wherever I have spoken I have addressed 
audiences like this, audiences composed of Americans and noth- 
ing else. (Cheers and applause.) 

Great is your State, oh my fellow-citizens; great is your 
State, men and women of California, and a great thing it is to 
be a Californian; but it is even a greater thing to be what all 
of us are— Americans, the citizens of the greatest republic upon 
which the sun has ever shone. (Cheers and applause.) 



["3] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS TO THE SERVICE MEN OF THE 
SPANISH WAR, WHO ACTED AS HIS 
ESCORT AT OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA 

May 14, 190J 

Afloat and ashore, nothing could have pleased me more than 
to have you turn out to be my escort today; to see the familiar 
gray hat, blue shirt, khaki trousers and leggings, I feel as if I 
was at home with you. I see men who served in the cavalry 
(I was a yellow-leg myself), infantry and artillery. I wish to 
state that it made me proud as I looked at you, and I appreciate 
your coming out, and now, as each one of you goes back into 
civil life, let you and me resolve that we will do our part, in 
the first place to see that the standard of citizenship is kept 
up, and in the next place that the average American citizen 
understands what a good man our brother, the army and navy 
man, officer and enlisted man of the regular service, was and 
is. (Cheers.) 



[114] 



B Y 



PRESIDENT ROOSEVEL 



REMARKS TO THE VETERANS WHO ES- 
CORTED HIM TO THE DOCK AT OAK- 
LAND, CALIFORNIA 

Mat 14, 190J 
My Comrades of the Great War: 

I wish to thank you for the privilege. These are the only 
bodies of men to whom it gives me even greater pleasure to 
pay greetmg than to my own comrades of the lesser war. Pleased 
though I was to have the service men of the war parade as 
my escort, lookmg so familiar in the uniform that I knew so 
well, yet it is an even greater pleasure to be greeted by you 
whose example we endeavored to follow, and the memories of 
whose deeds must forever be to all Americans a source of in- 
spiration to duty, whether it be in war or in peace. (Cheer, 
and applause.) 



[.>5] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT THE LAYING OF THE COR- 
NER-STONE OF THE Y. M. C. A. AUX- 
ILIARY CLUBHOUSE, VALLEJO, CALI- 
FORNIA 

May 14, 190} 

Mrs. McCalla, and You, My Fellow-Citizens: 

I am glad to have the chance of taking part in these cere- 
monies, for no worthier object can be striven after than the 
creation of a building such as this for the benefit of those to 
whom every American owes so much — the enlisted men of the 
United States navy. (Cheers and applause.) I wish here to 
relate something told me yesterday by Secretary Moody, which 
shows the spirit that actuates the men of our navy. In visiting 
the hospital at Mare Island yesterday Secretary Moody found 
that there was a little library of two hundred standard novels, 
and a sum of money with interest amounting to $30 a year to be 
spent on magazines, all for the use of the patients, for the use 
of the enlisted men in that hospital, and he found that that 
was due to the action of a man now dead, who had served 
twenty-five years in the United States navy, had become a 
boatswain, and when he died had left all his small savings to 
be thus devoted in perpetuity to the use of his fellows who 
should need the hospital thereafter. His name was Alexander 
White, and Secretary Moody told me he intended to find out 
where he was buried and put a fitting stone over him if he had to 
pay for it himself. (Applause.) That is the spirit of devotion 
to the flag and the country, and to one's fellows which the 
United States navy develops. 

I wish to take this opportunity of thanking the men who work 
in the Navy Yard for the quality of the work that they do. 

[116] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

(Cheers and applause.) It has been a pleasure to hear from 
Admiral Miller as we came up on the torpedo boat the kind 
of service rendered by those engaged in the actual labor in 
the yard. I want to emphasize what we can never over-empha- 
size, that the credit for any victory must lie exactly as much 
with those who prepare for it as with those who win it. (Ap- 
plause.) 

Today I have dedicated the monument to those who won the 
battle of Manila Bay. That monument is in reality dedicated just 
as much to the men who in any degree helped make ready the 
ships for that battle, to the Congressmen who voted the ap- 
propriations ; and those who did not, by the way, have no right 
to any share whatever in the credit attached to the nation for 
that day, to the Congressmen who voted the appropriations, to 
the Cabinet officials and their subordinates, the heads of the 
bureaus in the Navy Department, under whom and in accord- 
ance with the directions of whom the money was expended, 
the owners of the private shipyards, to the men who worked 
in the private shipyards and to the men who worked in the 
national shipyards, any man who did his part at any stage in 
preparing the hulls, the engines, the armor, the guns of those 
ships, and all men who took part in training the crews aboard 
them, the men in the engine rooms, the men at the guns, in 
fitting them for service, to all alike some portion of the credit 
of the victory is due. Let me repeat what I said this morning. 
I am glad that we have the chance to erect a monument to 
commemorate a naval victory of the United States, and let us 
see to it that our children have the chance to erect a similar 
monument, should the need arise, in their turn. In other words, 
let us see to it that the work of building up the United States 
navy goes on without a halt. (Cheers and applause.) 

I thank those who have provided for the building of this in- 
stitution. When a war comes I think a heavier burden is laid 
upon the women whose sons and husbands, fathers and lovers 
have gone to the war than upon the men who go. It was cer- 

["7] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 

tainly so in the Civil War, where the woman was left at home 
with the breadwinner gone, to face often need as well as the 
anxiety for his safety; and it is but a further debt we owe now 
for the building of institutions of this kind. They do incalcula- 
ble good. I do not know of anything that has done, any one 
work of benevolence of the same extent which was better worth 
doing than that done by Miss Helen Gould when she erected 
a building similar to this in the New York Navy Yard; and 
I am glad to have had the chance of laying the corner stone of 
this building today. I thank you for coming to greet me. I 
thank especially my own comrades of the Spanish-American 
War, those who fought in that war, and those by whose example 
we profited — the men of the Great War, the men who have left 
to this country a heritage of honor and glory forever. (Cheers 
and applause.) 



[ii8 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT THE BANQUET TENDERED 
HIM BY THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF 
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 

May 14, 190J 

Mr. Toastmaster, and You, My Fellow-Members of the 
Union League Club: (Cheers and applause.) 

Let me say in all sincerity, Mr. Davis, that you have ex- 
pressed far better than I could express (and I mean it) what 
I hold to be essential in American citizenship. (Applause.) It 
was a privilege, sir, to be greeted by you as you have greeted 
me tonight. No one can too strongly insist upon the elementary 
fact that you cannot build the superstructure of public virtue 
save on private virtue. (Applause.) The sum of the parts is 
the whole, and if we wish to make that whole, the State, decent, 
the representative and exponent and symbol of decency, it must 
be so made through the decency, public and private, of the 
average citizen. Mr. Davis was quite safe in saying he hoped 
I had enjoyed my stay in San Francisco. I should indeed be 
ungrateful, unappreciative, if I were not deeply touched and 
moved by the way in which the people of San Francisco have 
received me ; and I have enjoyed to the full the two days and 
a half I have spent here. I have enjoyed it all and I have 
enjoyed no part more. General MacArthur, than my ride down 
the line, reviewing the troops with you. (Applause.) 

Californians are good Americans, and therefore it is not 
necessary to appeal to them on behalf of the army and the navy. 
(, Applause.) I shall not detain you long this evening. I am 
promised by Colonel Pippy the chance, after my speech, of 
meeting and shaking hands with each of you, in the rooms of 
the Club. (Cheers and applause.) I have just got two thoughts. 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



not connected together, to which I want to give utterance tonight ; 
one suggested by something that Mr. Davis said. 

It is absolutely essential, if we are to have the proper standard 
of public life, that promise shall be square with performance. 
A lie is no more to be excused in politics than out of politics. 
(Qieers and applause, long continued.) 

A promise is as binding on the stump as off the stump, and 
there are two facets to that crystal. In the first place, the man 
who makes a promise which he does not intend to keep and 
does not try to keep should rightly be adjudged to have forfeited 
in some degree what should be every man's most precious 
possession — his honor. (Applause.) On the other hand, the 
public that exacts a promise which ought not to be kept, or 
which cannot be kept, is by just so much forfeiting its right to 
self-government. (Applause.) There is no surer way of de- 
stroying the capacity for self-government in a people than to 
accustom that people to demanding the impossible or the im- 
proper from its public men. No man fit to be a public man 
will promise either the impossible or the improper; and if the 
demand is made that he shall do so it means putting a premium 
upon the unfit in public life. (Great applause.) 

There is the same sound reason for distrusting the man who 
promises too much in public that there is for distrusting the 
man who promises too much in private business. If you meet 
a doctor who asserts that he has a specific remedy that will 
cure all the ills to which human flesh is heir, distrust him. 
He hasn't got it. If you meet the business man who vociferates 
that he is always selling everything to you at a loss, and you 
continue to deal with him, I am glad if you suffer for it. (Ap- 
plause.) Any man who promises as a result of legislation or 
administration the millennium is making a promise which he will 
find difficulty in keeping. Any man who asserts that by any 
law it will be possible, out of hand, to make all humanity good 
and wise, is again promising what he cannot perform. It is 
indispensable that we should have good laws and upright and 

[I20] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



honest and fearless administration of the laws; and we are not 
to be excused if we fail to hold our public men to a rigid ac- 
countability if they fail, in their turn, to see that we have 
proper legislation and proper administration. No public man 
worth his salt will be other than glad to be held accountable 
in that fashion. (Applause.) 

But important though the law is, though the administration 
of the law is, we can never escape having to face the fundamental 
truth that neither begins to be of the decisive importance that 
the average individual's character is. In the last analysis it is 
the man's own character which is and must ever be the deter- 
mining factor in his success or failure in life (applause), and 
therefore in the last analysis it is the average character of the 
average citizenship of a nation which will in the long run de- 
termine whetlier that nation is to go up or down. (Applause.) 

The one indispensable thing for us to keep is a high standard 
of character for the average American citizen. (Applause.) 

Now for my unrelated second thought, and that is to reiterate 
something that I said this morning. I had the very great pleas- 
ure of dedicating the monument to Dewey's fleet for its victory 
at Manila. (Applause.) We today were enjoying the aftermath 
of the triumph, due in part to what Dewey and his officers and 
men did on the first day of May, five years ago, and in even 
greater part to what those men did who in the past fifteen years 
had prepared for the winning of that triumph. (Applause.) I 
have very great confidence in the capacity of our average soldier 
or sailor to turn out well, to do admirably when put to the 
supreme test. But the best man alive, if untrained, if unfitly 
armed, may be beaten by a poorer man who has had the training 
and the arms. (Applause.) There is nothing more foolish, noth- 
ing less dignified than to indulge in boastfulness, in self-glorifi- 
cation as to the capacity of our soldiers and sailors while deny- 
ing them the material which we are in honor bound to give 
them in order that their splendid natural qualities shall be fitly 
supplemented. (Cheers and applause.) I have seen our people 

[lai] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



send American volunteers against a European soldiery, that 
European soldiery armed with the finest type of modern rifle 
and ours with an old black-powder weapon, which was about 
as effective as a medieval cross bow ; and those who failed to 
prepare the proper weapons for our people are not to be thanked, 
because by making drafts of an extraordinary kind upon the 
other good qualities of the American soldier, we escaped dis- 
aster. (Applause.) 

And who were those who failed to prepare? It is very easy 
and worse than foolish, it is wicked, to hold the people who at 
the moment are obliged to use those weapons responsible when 
the real responsibility lay with the representatives of our people 
and our people themselves for failing to make the preparation 
in advance. (Applause.) 

The business of finding a scapegoat to send loose into the 
wilderness is neither honorable nor dignified for a self-respecting 
people to be engaged in. (Applause.) We commemorated today 
by a monument a great naval victory. We commemorated there- 
by the foresight, the prudence of the public men, of the great 
business men, of the shipwrights, the men who worked physi- 
cally at the armor, the guns, the engines, the hulls, in getting the 
fleet ready; and, more than that, we commemorated the men 
who trained that fleet in readiness. Many an officer who was 
retired before the Spanish War came is entitled to his full share 
of the credit for what was done in that war, although he never 
saw it, because he had done his part in actual sea service in 
training the men to handle the mighty and delicate weapons of 
war intrusted to their care. (Applause.) 

Every public man who by his vote helped to make efficient that 
navy, every business man, every wage-worker, who did honest 
work on the ships, and every representative of the navy, officer 
or enlisted man, who in the years before the war faithfully did 
his duty aboard the ships in fitting crew and ship for the test 
of war, is entitled to a portion of the credit of the victory in 
Manila Bay. (Applause.) 

[I2Z] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



So it is with the army. I beHeve — no, I am not going to boast, 
and so I am going to say a Httle less than I think — I shall shift 
the form of my sentence and say that I have entire confidence 
in the average officer and average enlisted man in the army 
of the United States (cheers and applause) if only he is given 
any kind of a fair chance, but give him good weapons, and give 
him a chance to handle them and to handle himself so as to be 
prepared for war. The best man alive, if he is given no chance 
to practice, cannot be expected when first put to a test to show 
his abilities at their best. Give us a chance to handle our men 
in masses in time of peace. Remember that if you scatter the 
army in fifties or hundreds all over the country, you must expect 
as inevitable, and as not in the least blameworthy on the part 
of the army, trouble, when you come to gather them together as 
an army and to send them into a foreign country. (Applause.) 

Give our army a chance, or even half a chance, to practice in 
time of peace the performance of its proper function in time of 
war, and I can guarantee that the American people will ever in 
the future have the same cause that they have had in the past 
to be proud of the army and navy of the United States. 
(Cheers and applause, long continued.) 



[^^3] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
RAYMOND, CALIFORNIA 

May 15, 190J 

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I did not realize that I was to meet you today, still less to 
address an audience such as this ! and I had only come prepared 
to go into the Yosemite with John Muir, so I must ask you to 
excuse my costume. (Cries of "It is all right!") I have en- 
joyed so much seeing Southern California and San Francisco 
that I felt my trip would be incomplete if I did not get up into 
your beautiful country and then see the Yosemite. Before I 
came on this trip I was inclined to grumble because I found 
we were giving relatively four times as much time to California 
as to any other State. Now I feel that we did not give it half 
enough. It ought to have been eight times instead of four 
times. I have enjoyed being here. I have never been on the 
Pacific Coast before. For a number of years I lived in the 
Rockies. I was in the cow business in those days. Great though 
my pleasure has been in seeing your wonderful soil, your won- 
derful climate, your fruits and flowers, your extraordinary and 
beautiful natural products, yet what I have liked most has been 
meeting the men and women, and finding that the fundamental 
fact throughout this country is that wherever you go, from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific, a good American is a good American, 
and nothing else. (Applause.) Here, as everywhere that I 
have been in California, I am greeted by men who wear the 
button which shows that in the times that tried men's souls 
they proved their truth by their endeavor. As they then be- 
longed to different regiments, doubtless raised in different States, 
but fought for one flag and one country, so now wherever we 
are citizens, in the East, in the West, or here beyond the West, 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



in California, wherever we are citizens, our duties are the same; 
our duty is to lead our lives in a spirit of decency, of courage 
and of common sense, that will make us fit to be citizens of this 
great republic. (Cheers and applause.) 



[1^5 1 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
BERENDA, CALIFORNIA 

May i8, 190J 

My Friends and Fellow-Citizens: 

I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you of this 
wonderful and fertile valley, the San Joaquin Valley (cheers and 
applause) ; and even glimpses I have got of it have made me 
appreciate its fertility. I am glad that the soil and the climate 
here are such as to give us that indispensable base of material 
prosperity, the foundation upon which we must rest, but, gen- 
tlemen and ladies, the thing that pleases me most, even more 
than the crops, is the men and women I meet. (Applause.) I 
believe in your future, because I believe in you — not only in 
the climate and the soil. You can take the best climate and the 
best soil and put a poor, shiftless, trifling creature on the soil 
and you do not get any results. To take advantage of the 
greatest opportunities you must have the men. I fail to see 
how any public man cannot believe in the future of this country 
after he has gone, as I have gone, from one side of the continent 
to the other, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has met audi- 
ences everywhere to whom he can appeal in the name of the 
fundamental virtues of American citizenship, fundamental virtues 
that go to make up good men and good women everywhere, and 
have gone to make them up since time began. I believe not in 
brilliancy, not in genius, I believe in the ordinary, humdrum, 
work-a-day virtues that make a man a good man in his family, 
a good neighbor, a good man to deal with in business, a good 
man to deal with in the State, and when you have got a man 
with those characteristics in him you have a man who if the need 
comes will rise level to that need. There are any number of 
different kinds of work that we have to do, all of which have to 

[ia6] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



be done. There is the work of the farmer, the work of the 
business man, the work of the skilled mechanic, the work of the 
men to whom I owe my safety every day and every night— the 
work of the railroad men; the work of the lawyer, the work 
of the sailor, the work of the soldier, the work in ten thousand 
ways; it is all good work; it does not make any difference what 
work the man is doing if he does it well. If the man is a slack, 
shiftless creature I wish we could get rid of him. He is of no 
use. In every occupation you will find some men whom you 
will have to carry. You cannot do much with them. Every 
one of us will stumble at times, and shame to the man who does 
not at such times stretch out a helping hand, but if the man 
lies down you cannot carry him to any permanent use. What 
I would plead for is that we recognize that fact, that we bring 
up our children to work, so that each respects the other. I do 
not care whether a man is a banker or a bricklayer; if he is 
a good banker or a good bricklayer he is a good citizen; if he 
is dishonest, if he is tricky, if he shirks his job or tries to cheat 
his neighbor, be he great or small, be he the poor man cheating 
the rich man, or the rich man oppressing the poor man, in either 
case he is a bad citizen. I thank you and want to say what a 
pleasure it has been to see you here this evening. (Cheers and 
applause.) 



[1^7] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
MERCED, CALIFORNIA 

May i8, 1903 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I am glad to have the chance of stopping here to greet you, 
and to say how much I have enjoyed my trip up in your moun- 
tains and my whole trip through California. It has been the 
greatest possible pleasure to get out here. I have enjoyed seeing 
the mountains; I have enjoyed seeing your scenery; I have en- 
joyed witnessing the wonderful products of your climate and 
soil; but what I have enjoyed most has been the chance to see 
the men and women of California. (Cheers.) 



[128] 



o 




BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
MODESTO, CALIFORNIA 

May i8, 190J 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I am very glad to catch this glimpse of you. I have passed 
four delightful days in your mountains up there in the Yo- 
semite and I cannot say how much I have enjoyed them, but 
I have enjoyed even more my entire trip through California 
and the courtesy and hospitality with which I have been received. 
It has been a great pleasure to me to come from the East to 
the West, then west of the West to California, and to see your 
wonderful State. And while I have enjoyed it all, enjoyed see- 
ing the soil and the climate, enjoyed witnessing the abounding 
prosperity that you have succeeded in making, the thing that 
I have enjoyed most has been seeing the men and women, the 
citizens of California, for that is what counts most in the long 
run. The soil and the climate will not count for anything if the 
people have not got it in them to take advantage of the soil and 
climate. I think I came to California a middling good American 
and I will go away a better American. It has been the greatest 
pleasure to see you all. (Applause.) 



[129] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



ADDRESS AT 
TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA 

May 19, 190J 

Mr. Chairman and My Fellow-Citizens: 

I want to thank you for coming out to greet me. Most of all, 
I wish to thank the men of the Grand Army who are present. 
It has b-^en a peculiarly pleasant thing wherever I have been in 
California to be greeted by some of those men to whose actions 
we owe it that there is now a common country of ours or a 
President over it. (Applause.) It has always seemed to me that 
we should profit by the lessons that they taught, not merely in 
war, but in peace. In speaking to you here in this great and 
wonderful State of California, with its marvelously diversified 
industries, with its irrigated agriculture in the south, with its 
agriculture carried on in ordinary fashion in the north, its pas- 
turage, its mines, its commerce, its manufactures, its wonderful 
railroad development, I speak to a community which has risen 
and gone forward because of the type of character, the type of 
manhood and womanhood among its sons and daughters. 

The lesson to be learned from the men of the Civil War is 
the lesson of resolute endeavor for a worthy cause. I would 
not preach to any man the life of ease, the life of safety only. 
Instead of the life of ease I preach to all worthy to be called 
men, the life of work, the life of endeavor, and instead of the 
life of safety I preach the doctrine that teaches us now as it 
taught the men of the Civil War, that there are times when 
safety is the last thing to be considered. (Applause.) Here in 
America, throughout our country, what we need are the virtues 
of the pioneers, and among the pioneers I put high the pioneers 
of the churches who went hand in hand to do the work of the 
Lord with their fellow-men. You need various qualities to 

[130] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



make a State great, a nation great, just as you needed those qual- 
ities to make an army great. No one of them will suffice. In the 
first place, you must have the base of morality, of decency, love 
of country, love of friends, the quality that makes a man a good 
father, a good neighbor, a decent citizen. You need that first, just 
as in the Civil War you needed to have patriotism first, love 
of country, the spirit that drove you to think nothing of ease, 
nothing of comfort, but to go out to do the work of the nation 
when that nation called, when Abraham Lincoln summoned you 
to battle; but that was not enough. I do not care how patriotic 
a man was, if he ran away you could do nothing with him. It is 
the same way here in civil life. I wish a man to be decent, a 
square man, a fair dealing man, but he has got to be a man also 
or you cannot do much with him. He has got to have courage, 
hardihood, power to work, power to hold his own, to do what- 
ever his hands find to do, he has got to have that or he will 
not amount to much. He has got to have it in him to make his 
own way or he is a weakling and will fall by the wayside. In 
addition to the qualities of decency, of honesty, there must be 
the qualities of manliness, of hardihood, the qualities that sent 
the pioneers across the trackless wastes, the quality that sends 
the soldier to battle, the quality that makes a man discontented 
and ill at ease if he cannot do his work well on the farm, in the 
shops, wherever his work is. You need those and you need some- 
thing in addition, for I do not care how brave a man is, how 
honest he is, if he is a fool you can do nothing with him. He 
needs the saving grace of common sense to help him out, to 
make his work count. 

There is another lesson taught by the men who wore the 
blue — the lesson of brotherhood; brotherhood in its broadest 
sense; brotherhood that does not recognize the difference of 
sections and that recognizes just as little the difference of class, 
that treats a man on his worth as a man, and if he is square 
stands by him ; if he is not square is against him, and recognizes 
other distinctions as accidental, not fundamental. One lesson of 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



that brotherhood is the self-respect that respects others. In the 
army, from the lieutenant-general down to the last newly en- 
listed recruit, the thing that concerned you was how the man 
did his duty in his place, and not what that place was. There 
are in this country a thousand different shapes of work. We 
have got to do them all, and we can do them well only if we 
recognize the need that each work should be well done; whether 
the man is a business man, a lawyer, a farmer, a railroad man, 
a mechanic, matters nothing. What matters is, does he do his 
work and his duty well? Is he a square man and a brave man, 
a good citizen, a good neighbor, a man whom you are glad to 
have associate with you as an American? If he is, he is a good 
citizen and entitled to honor; if he is not, I care not whether 
he be high or low in social standing or in wealth, he is a bad 
citizen and a curse to the State. All kinds of honorable work 
entitle those following them to honor. For the last few weeks 
and for the next few, every minute and every hour my safety 
depends upon how the railroad men do their work. Naturally, 
I take a peculiar interest in them. But we must take the same 
interest in all men who do their work well. If a man does his 
duty he is a good citizen and we should be proud of him. 

Just let me ask you one word especially to the railroad men. 
I recollect the last time I ever met General Sherman he told me 
that if he had to raise an army composed purely of one class 
he would take railroad men because they developed four or five 
qualities that counted more than anything else, qualities of 
taking risks, of irregular hours (so that to be up at night does 
not strike them with horror), of accepting responsibility, and 
yet of obeying orders, and obeying them at once, not wondering 
whether to turn the switch then or later, but turning it then, 
and in consequence the men who have had that training will 
make good soldiers, and when you make a really good soldier 
you will make a good citizen. We cannot all be railroad men, 
but we can all be good citizens and show the same type of 
quality. 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



I am glad to see all of you, but perhaps I am most glad to 
see the children. (Cheers and applause.) 



[«33] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
COLFAX, CALIFORNIA 

^May 19, 190J 

My Fellow-Citizens, My Fellow-Americans (applause), Men 
AND Women of Placer County : 

It is the greatest pleasure to have caught even a glimpse of the 
miners here. I do not have to preach to you. You practice 
what I preach, and I hope I do myself, too. (Laughter.) You 
in your lives here have done the things which it makes all of 
us proud as Americans to have done. We do not believe here 
in this republic in the men who seek only the life of ease, the 
life of absence of effort. We believe in the men who face toil, 
who face risk, who dare, who do and who triumph because they 
have done it. (Cheers and applause.) 



[>34] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
AUBURN, CALIFORNIA 

May 19, 1903 

My Fellow-Citizens: 

I thank you most heartily for your kindness in coming to greet 
me, and I am so pleased to see you, men and women of Placer 
County. I have enjoyed to the full my visit to California. I 
have been astonished and delighted with your extraordinary suc- 
cess in so many different types of industries— mining, agriculture 
of so many kinds, manufacturing, your wonderful commerce. It 
is particularly a pleasure to be in a State already great, and yet 
with an infinitely greater future before it. But pleased though 
I am to see your abounding material prosperity, the products 
of your soil, the thing I am most pleased with is you yourselves, 
the men and women. It has been a great pleasure to have caught 
this glimpse of you. (Cheers and applause.) 



[135] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT THE PARK, 
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 

May 19, 190J 

Mr. Mayor, and You, Men and Women of Sacramento, and 
TO You, the Children : 

I am particularly glad to see the children this afternoon. I 
want to say a word to the teachers. There is no body of men and 
women in all our country to whom so much is owing as to those 
who are training the next generation, because it is the merest 
truism to say that the next generation determines the fate of 
this country. It is a great thing to have such commerce, such 
industry, such manufactures, such agriculture, as I have seen 
evidences of here in California; but the important thing, after 
all, is the quality of the citizenship. (Applause.) Therefore, 
the future of the State depends not upon what is material, for 
that you can produce if you have the heart, the hand, and the 
head to do it; it depends upon the quality of heart, hand and 
head in the average American. That is what counts. Therefore 
a peculiar debt is owing to those who are educating the boys 
and girls of today, who will be the men and women of tomorrow, 
and upon whom we must depend to keep alive the traditions of 
our citizenship. 

I greet with pleasure you boys and girls, and you of the high 
school, you who in not many years will have to take upon your- 
selves the duties that come with full growth of body and mind. 
I am going to repeat to you one bit of advice which I have 
already given, advice to the young, which applies also to the 
old. I believe in play and I believe in work. I believe in hav- 
ing a good time, provided it does not interfere with your doing 
the work there is to do. Play hard while you play, and when 
you work do not play at all. 

[136] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



It has given me the keenest pleasure to witness tonight this 
wonderful gathering in this beautiful place. I have come from 
the Atlantic across this continent to the Pacific, and in meeting 
the different bodies of my fellow-citizens one thing has struck 
me particularly, and that is the essential unity of our people. 
East or West, North or South, by the Atlantic, in the great val- 
ley of the Mississippi, among the Rockies, and here beside the 
greatest of all the oceans, wherever I meet a body of our people 
I meet men and women to whom I can appeal as Americans, and 
nothing else. I greet you, I thank you for coming. I am proud 
of you, proud to be your fellow-citizen. I believe in you with all 
my heart and I believe that the century that is opening contains 
the promise of the greatest achievement for this nation that any 
nation has ever enjoyed since the dim days when history dawned. 
(Cheers and applause.) 



['37] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS TO THE SACRAMENTO SO- 
CIETY OF CALIFORNIA PIONEERS, 
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 

May 19, 1903 

I wish to thank you and the members of the Sacramento So- 
ciety of California Pioneers. Of course, the members of your 
society must ever feel not merely a particular interest in, but 
a part in the development of this State such as no other can 
have. To you it was given in the heroic days to do the great 
deeds by which this republic was made in very truth the mistress 
of the two great oceans, for such she shall be in the years to 
come. It was following your guidance that our people con- 
quered this continent and made it the base for this mighty and 
wonderful nation, a nation mighty in its past, mightier yet in 
the possibility that the looming future holds for it. I thank 
you most heartily and appreciate particularly the courtesy of 
you and your fellow-members. (Cheers and applause.) 



[>38] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



ADDRESS AT THE CAPITOL BUILDING, 
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 

May 19, 1903 

Mr. Mayor, and You, My Fellow-Citizens: 

It is a great pleasure to have the chance of meeting you here 
in the capital city of your wonderful State. (Applause.) In 
greeting all of you I know that the others will not grudge my 
saying a special word of acknowledgment to those whose mettle 
rang true on war's red touchstone, to the men to whom we owe 
it that we have tonight one country or that there is a President 
to speak to you — (applause) — the men of the Grand Army, the 
veterans of the great war. I wish also to express at this time 
my acknowledgments to my escort, the National Guard, many 
of them my comrades in the lesser war of '98. (Laughter and 
applause.) You see, in '98 we had a difficulty from which you 
were wholly free in '61, because with us there was not enough 
war to go around. (Applause.) 

I have enjoyed to the full my visit to California. I have come 
across the continent from the East to the West, and now beyond 
the West to California, for California stands by itself. (Ap- 
plause.) I have enjoyed every hour of my stay here. I have 
just come from a four days' rest in the Yosemite, and I wish 
to say one word to you here in the capital city of California about 
certain of your great natural resources, your forests and the 
water supply coming from the streams that find their sources 
among the forests of the mountains. 

California possesses a wonderful climate, a wonderful soil, 
and throughout the portions that I have visited it is literally 
astounding to see how the land yields a hundred and a thousand 
fold when water is put upon it. And where it is possible to irri- 
gate the land the result is, of course, far better than having to 

[>39] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



depend upon rainfall anywhere, but no small part of the pros- 
perity of California in the hotter and drier agricultural regions 
depends upon the preservation of her water supply; and the 
water supply cannot be preserved unless the forests are pre- 
served. (Applause.) As regards some of the trees, I want 
them preserved because they are the only things of their kind 
in the world. Lying out at night under those giant Sequoias 
was lying in a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander 
than any human architect could by any possibility build, and I 
hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply 
because it would be » shame to our civilization to let them dis- 
appear. They are monuments in themselves. I ask for the pres- 
ervation of the other forests on grounds of wise and far-sighted 
economic policy. I do not ask that lumbering be stopped at all. 
On the contrary, I ask that the forests be kept for use in lum- 
bering, only that they be so used that not only shall we here, 
this generation, get the benefit for the next few years, but that 
our children and our children's children shall get the benefit. 
In California I am impressed by how great the State is, but I 
am even more impressed by the immensely greater greatness that 
lies in the future, and I ask that your marvelous natural resources 
be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. (Applause.) We 
ire not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last 
through the ages. We stand on the threshold of a new century. 
We look into the dim years that rise before us, knowing that 
if we are true that the generations that succeed us here shall 
fall heir to a heritage such as has never been known before. I 
ask that we keep in mind not only our own interests, but the 
interests of our children. Any generation fit to do its work must 
work for the future, for the people of the future, as well as for 
itself. You, men of the Civil War, fought from '6i to '65 for the 
Union of that day ; yes, and for the Union that was to stand while 
nations stand in the hereafter. (Applause.) You fought to make 
the flag that had been rent asunder once more whole and without 
a seam and to float over you and to float over all who come 

[140] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



after you likewise. You fought for the future; you fought for 
the looming greatness of the republic in the centuries that were 
to come, and now I ask that we, in fulfilling the duties of citi- 
zenship, keep our gaze fixed likewise on the days that are to 
come after us. You are building here this great State within 
whose bounds lies an area as great as an Old World empire, a 
State with a commerce already vast, but with a commerce which 
within the century that has now opened shall cover and dominate 
the entire Pacific Ocean. (Applause.) You are building your 
factories, you are tilling the fields; business man, professional 
man, farmer, wage-worker, all here in this State see a future of 
unknown possibilities opening before them. 

I earnestly ask that you see to it that your resources, by use, 
are perpetuated for the use of the peoples yet unborn. Use them, 
but in using, keep and preserve them. Keep the waters ; keep 
the forests; use your lands as you use your bays, your harbors, 
as you use the cities here, so that by the very fact of the use 
they will become more valuable as possessions. 

I have spoken of the material things, of the things which are 
indispensable as the foundation, the base of national greatness. 
We must care for the body first. We must see to it that our 
tremendous industrial development goes on, that the well-being 
continues; that the soil yields its wealth in the future as it has 
in the past, aye, and tenfold more. We cannot for one moment 
afford to underestimate the vital importance of that material 
well-being, of the prosperity which we so abundantly enjoy, but 
I ask also that you remember the things of the mind and the 
soul as well as the body. Nothing has struck me more in going 
through California than the interest you are paying to the cause 
of education, than the way in which your citizens evidently 
realize that upon the proper training of the children, of those who 
are to be the men and women of a score of years hence, depends 
the ultimate welfare of the republic. Let me draw a lesson from 
you, the men of the Civil War. You needed strong bodies, you 
needed the supplies, the arms, but more than all, you needed 

C«4«] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



the hearts that drove the bodies into battle. What distinguished 
our men was the spirit that drove them onward to effort and to 
strife, onward into action, onward through the march, through 
the long months of waiting in camp, onward through the fiery- 
ordeal of battle, when men's souls were winnowed out as before 
the judgment seat. You then rose level to the duty that was 
before you because of the spirit that burned within your breasts, 
because you had in you the capacity of generous enthusiasm for 
the lofty ideal, because you realized that there was something 
above the body and greater than the body. And now, my fel- 
lows, men and women of California, men and women of the 
American Union, I ask throughout this country that our people 
keep in their hearts the capacity of devotion to what stands 
above mere bodily welfare, to the welfare of the spirit, of the 
mind, of the soul. I ask that we have strong bodies, well cared 
for, well clothed, well housed. I ask for what is better than a 
strong body, a sane mind. And I ask finally for what counts 
for more than body, for more than mind, for character ; character 
which in the last analysis tells most in settling the welfare of 
either a nation or an individual; character into which many ele- 
ments enter, but three, above all; in the first place, as a founda- 
tion, decency, honesty, morality, the quality that makes a man a 
good husband, a good neighbor, a man who deals fairly and 
squarely with those about him, who does his duty to those 
around him and to the State; and that is not enough. Decency 
and honesty are not enough. Just as in the Civil War you 
needed patriotism first, but it made no matter how patriotic a 
man was, if he ran away you could do nothing with him. (Ap- 
plause.) So in civic life you must have decency and honesty, 
for without them ability makes a man only the more dangerous 
to his fellows, the greater force for evil. Just again as in the 
Civil War, if the man did not have in him the capacity of loyalty 
to his fellows, loyalty to his regiment, loyalty to the flag, if 
he did not have in him that capacity, the abler he was the worse 
he was to have in the army. So it is now in civil life; the abler 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



a man is, if he has not the root of righteousness in him the 
more dangerous a foe to decent government he is, and we shall 
never rise level to the needs of our nation until we make it 
understood that the scoundrel who succeeds is to be hunted down 
by public opinion, by the condemnation and scorn of his fellows, 
exactly as we hunt down the weaker scoundrel who fails. (Ap- 
plause.) But that is not enough. Decency and honesty are a 
basis, but that is all. I do not care how moral a man is, if his 
morality is only good while he sits at home in his own parlor, 
you can do nothing with him. Scant is the use we have for the 
timid good. In the war you needed patriotism, and then you 
needed the fighting edge. You had to have that. So in civil 
life we need the spirit of decency, of honesty, and then, in addi- 
tion, the quality of courage, of hardihood, of manliness, that 
makes a man fit to go out into the hurly-burly and do a man's 
work in the world. That must come, too ; and that is not enough. 
I do not care how moral a man is and how brave he is, if he is 
a natural bom fool you can do nothing with him. I ask, then, 
for decency as the foundation, for courage and manliness thereon, 
and finally, in addition to both, I ask for common sense as the 
moderator and guide of both. (Applause.) 

My fellow-countrymen, I believe in you ; I believe in your 
future; I believe in the future of the American republic, because 
I believe that the average American citizen has in him just those 
qualities — the quality of honesty, the quality of courage, and the 
quality of common sense. While we keep in the community 
the power of adherence to a lofty ideal and at the same time the 
power to attempt its realization by practical methods, we can 
be sure that our progress in the future will be even more rapid 
than our progress has been in the past, and that in the century 
now opening, in the centuries that succeed it, this country, already 
the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shone, will 
attain a position of prominence in the world's history that will 
dwarf into insignificance all that has ever been done before. 
(Cheers and applause.) 

[143] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
REDDING, CALIFORNIA 

May zo, 1903 

My Friends and Fellow-Citizens: 

It is a great pleasure to see you to-day. This is to be my last 
day in California, and I leave the State with the liveliest appre- 
ciation of the courtesy with which I have been received, and 
with memories which I shall ever keep of the pleasant days I 
have had within your borders. I have seen pretty much all the 
State from the ocean up to the Sierras and into them; I have 
come from the south and am leaving at the northern end; and 
I am impressed, as every man must be, with what our nation is 
to have within its borders a State such as this, a State in re- 
sources and size the equal to many an Old World empire. (Ap- 
plause.) I have enjoyed everything, seeing your farms, your 
ranches, your cities, noting the diversification of your industries, 
seeing the products of the ranch, of the irrigated agriculture, of 
the mine, of the forest, realizing as a man must, who sees San 
Francisco and that wonderful harbor that here is one of the cities 
which must in time now near do its full share in dominating 
the commerce of the world. (Applause.) I have enjoyed all of 
these sights; but most of all I have enjoyed seeing you, the men 
and women of California. (Applause.) That is what counts 
ultimately in any nation. We need of course the physical advan- 
tages, but they are useless if we have not got the men to take 
advantage of them. Constitution, laws, — ^they are good things, 
indispensable things, to have right, but you must have the men 
behind them or they will amount to but little. There are other 
nations with the same type of constitution, the same theoretical 
form of government as ours, and yet those other nations have 
failed where we have succeeded because the type of citizenship 

[144] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



was different. So here, the climate and soil would amount to 
nothing, if you did not have men and women of the right type 
to take advantage of them. 

You here in California, who succeeded the pioneers, you have 
won your place by showing the qualities which we like to think 
of as typical of American citizens. If we of this great Republic 
are to continue in the future to rise level to our opportunities as 
our forefathers rose in the past, we must so rise by showing the 
traits which they showed. There is no patent recipe for making 
a good citizen any more than there is any patent recipe for mak- 
ing a successful man. Success will come in the long run to the 
man or the nation possessing the attributes that have conquered 
success from the days when we first have written records of the 
nations of mankind. If our people have courage, perseverance, 
self-restraint, self-mastery, will power and common sense — you 
need that always — we will win out. I said common sense ; I think 
that there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and 
that is softness of head. I want to see the average American 
citizen be in the future as he has been in the past, a decent man, 
doing no wrong, and on the other hand able to hold his own also ; 
and just as I want to see with the average citizen, I want to see 
with the nation. (Cheers and applause.) 



[H5] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
DUNSMUIR, CALIFORNIA 

May 20, 190J 

My Friends; 

It is a great pleasure to greet you today. I have enjoyed the 
last two hours traveling up by this beautiful river and getting 
my first glimpses of Shasta. It has been a very great pleasure 
to come here to this State beside the Pacific Ocean and see your 
people. I think I can say that I came to California a pretty good 
American, and I go away a better one. (Applause.) Glad though 
I have been to see your wonderful products, your plains and your 
mountains, your rivers, to see the great cities springing up, most 
of all have I enjoyed meeting the men and women to whom we 
owe what has been done with mine and railroad and lumbering 
camp and irrigated field, with the ranch and the counting-house, 
— the men and women who have made California what she is. 

Almost everywhere I have been greeted by men who are vet- 
erans of the Civil War ; or else by men who came here in the early 
pioneer days; and where that has not been the case I have met 
those who are their worthy successors, who are doing now the 
kind of work that is worth doing. I pity no man because he has 
to work. If he is worth his salt he will work. I envy the man 
who has a work worth doing and does it well ; and surely no 
men alive are more worthy of admiration than those men to 
whom it is given to build up a giant commonwealth like this. It 
is the fact of doing the work well that counts, not the kind of 
work, as long as that work is honorable. 

I speak to citizens of a community which has reached its pres- 
ent pitch of prosperity because they have done each his duty as 
his lines were laid. To the true American nothing can be more 
alien than the spirit either of envy or of contempt for another 

[146] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



who is leading a life as a decent citizen should lead it. In this 
country we have room for every honest man who spends his life 
in honest effort ; we have no room either for the man of means 
who, in a spirit of arrogant baseness, looks down upon the man 
less well off, or for the other man who envies his neighbor be- 
cause that neighbor happens to be better off. Either feeling is a 
base feeling, unworthy of a self-respecting man. 

I used the word envy, myself, just now, but I did not use it 
in a bad sense. If you use envy in the ordinary sense of the word 
its existence implies a feeling of inferiority in the man who feels 
it, a feeling that a self-respecting man will be ashamed to have. 
If the man is a good American and is doing his work squarely 
he need not envy anybody, because he occupies a position such 
as no one else in any other country, in any other age has oc- 
cupied; and because we hold our citizenship so high, because we 
feel and have the right to feel satisfaction with what our people 
have done, we should also feel that the only spirit in which to 
regard any other man who does well, is a spirit of kindly regard 
and good will if he acts squarely; if he does not, then I think 
but ill of you if you do not regard him as a man to feel at least 
the public scorn, public contempt. It is, of course, a perfectly 
trite saying that in no country is it so necessary to have decency, 
honesty, self-restraint, in the average citizen as in a republic, 
in a democracy; for successful self-government is founded upon 
that high average of citizenship among our people; and America 
has gone on as she has gone because we have had that high aver- 
age of citizenship. Our government is based upon the rule of a 
self-respecting majority. Our government has so far escaped the 
twin dangers of the older republics, government by a plutocracy 
or government by a mob, either of them absolutely alien to Ameri- 
can ideals. 

It has been a great pleasure to see you. I haven't any special 
word of preaching to say, because after all, men and women of 
California, I can only preach what in substance you have prac- 
ticed, what our people have practiced in the making and carrying 

[147] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 

on of this government. From the days of Washington to the 
days of Lincoln we went onward and upward because the aver- 
age American was of the stuff that made the nation go onward 
and upward. We cannot be dragged up, we have got to push 
ourselves up. No law that ever was devised can give wisdom to 
the fool, courage to the coward, strength to the weakling. We 
must have those qualities in us, for if they are not in us they 
cannot be gotten out of us. Of course all you have to do is to 
compare what other nations have done with governments founded 
as ours, the same type of constitution, the same type of law, which 
nevertheless have failed, have produced chaos because they did 
not have the right type of citizen back of the law, the right type 
of citizen to work out the destiny of the Nation under and 
through the law. Of course we need the right law ; we need even 
more the honest and fearless enforcement of the law, enforce- 
ment in a spirit of absolute fair play to all men, showing favorit- 
ism to none, doing justice to each. We need such laws, such ad- 
ministration of the laws, but most of all we need to keep up that 
for the lack of which nothing else can atone in any people — the 
average standard of citizenship — so that the average man shall 
have certain fundamental qualities that come under many differ- 
ent heads, but under three especially. In the first place, that he 
shall have at the foundation of his character the moral forces, 
the forces that make a man a good husband, a good father, a 
good neighbor, a man who deals fairly by his fellows, whether he 
works with them on the railroad or in the shops or in the fac- 
tories, whether he deals with them as a mechanic, as a lawyer, 
as a doctor, whether he grows the products of the soil as an 
earth-tiller, a miner, a lumberman, a sailor, whatever he is, what- 
ever his wealth, if he acts squarely he has fulfilled the first re- 
quisites of citizenship. We cannot afford in our Republic to draw 
distinctions between our citizens save on that line of conduct. 
There are good men and bad men everywhere. All of you know 
them in private life; all of you have met them. You have got 
to have decency and morality in the first place, and, of course, 

[148] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



that is not enough. It does not begin to be enough. No matter 
how decent a man is, if he is afraid he is no good. In addition 
to the quality of self-mastery, self-restraint, decency, you have 
got to have the quality of hardihood, courage, manliness, the 
quality which, if the people who founded this State had lacked, 
there never would have been a State founded here. You have 
got to have the men who can hold their own in work, and, if nec- 
essary, in fighting. You have got to have those qualities in ad- 
dition, and you have got to have others still. I do not care how 
brave a man is and how decent he is, if he is a natural born fool 
you can do very little with him. In addition to decency, in addi- 
tion to courage, you must have the saving grace of common 
sense ; the quality that enables any man to tell what he can do for 
himself and what he can do for his neighbor, for the nation. 
Sometimes each of us has the feeling that if he has to choose be- 
tween the fool and the knave he will take the knave, because he 
can reform him perhaps, and he cannot reform the fool ; and 
even hardness of heart is not much more destructive in the long 
run than softness of head. 

In our life what we need is not so much genius, not so much 
brilliancy, as the ordinary commonplace everyday qualities which 
a man needs in private life, and which he needs just as much in 
public life. 

In coming across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
the thing that has struck me most is that, fundamentally, wher- 
ever one goes in this broad country, a good American is a good 
American. (Applause.) 

I thank you with all my heart for coming here, and I wish you 
all good fortune in the future as in the past. (Cheers and ap- 
plause.) 



['49] 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
SISSON, CALIFORNIA 

May 20, 1903 

My Friends and Fellow-Citizens: 

It is indeed a great pleasure to have had the chance of going 
through your wonderful State; now I have come to the people 
who live among the mountains in the north; I come among the 
pine forests, and in sight of the great mountains. I hardly think 
that you yourselves can realize what a wonderful State it is, a 
State as large and as diversified as many an Old World empire. 
It is a great pleasure to have come here to see this wonderful 
State with its change from the semi-tropic, irrigated plains of the 
south, here to the northern mountains, a State situated between 
the Sierras and the Pacific; and especially I have enjoyed meet- 
ing the people who have made the State what it is. Wherever 
I have been I have seen in the audiences, men who wear the 
button which shows that they fought in the great Civil War; 
and it seems to me that the qualities which made those men vic- 
torious in the mortal strife of the Republic are akin to the quali- 
ties which made our people able to conquer plain and mountain, 
prairie and forest, and to create these commonwealths from the 
Atlantic seaboard across to the Pacific. (Applause.) 

I am glad to meet all of you. I congratulate you upon all the 
crops, but especially upon the children. I spoke of the soldiers 
of the great Civil War just now, and of your pioneer people; each 
was required to show the characteristics which have to be shown 
also in civil life if this Republic is to be made all that it should 
be made. In '61, when you and those like you went to battle, the 
first feeling that you had to have was the capacity for devotion 
to a lofty ideal, the spirit that made ease, comfort, safety, as 
nothing compared with the desire to keep the flag and to ring 

[>5o] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



true when the country called. In addition to that you had to have 
courage, hardihood, resolution, or you could not have made your 
aspirations good. It is just so in civil life, and the man has to be 
a decent man, a square man, a man who acts square by his 
neighbors, fairly by the State, or he cannot amount to anything; 
but in addition to the qualities of decency and fair dealing he 
must have the qualities that make a man a man, or he cannot do 
a man's work in the world. He has to have hardiliood, courage 
and endurance. (Cheers and applause.) 



[151I 



CALIFORNIA ADDRESSES 



REMARKS AT 
MONTAGUE, CALIFORNIA 

May 20, 1 90 J 

My Friends and Fellow- Citizens : 

It is a great pleasure to meet you this afternoon. I have en- 
joyed to the full my trip through California. I have come from 
the south through the State and now go out at the north. When 
the trip was made up I asked why it was necessary to give rela- 
tively four times as much time to California as to any other State, 
i understand now. (Applause.) I only wish it had been possible 
to make it eight times as much instead. This morning I have 
been greatly impressed in traveling through these mountains and 
meeting the men who have done so much in lumbering, as I have 
already met the men of the mines, and ranches, of the commerce 
and industries of the great cities. This State is in boundaries 
and resources greater than many an Old World empire ; and think 
what it is to be a citizen of a Union in which a commonwealth 
like this is a State. I have come from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
from the East through the West to beyond the west to California, 
for that stands by itself. (Applause.) The thing that has im- 
pressed me more than anything else in addressing the different 
audiences is that a good American is a good American in what- 
ever part of this country he lives. (Cheers and applause.) 



[15^] 



BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 



REMARKS AT 
HORNBROOK, CALIFORNIA 

May lo, 190J 

My Friends and Fellow-Citizens: 

I have just said good-bye to the Governor of California, and I 
am very, very sorry to part with him. He has been with me 
throughout my trip in California, and I have gone pretty fairly 
over the State with him. Today I have been traveling through 
the northern part of California, among the mountains and the 
forests, and it has given me an ever fresh view of your wonder- 
ful and beautiful State. As I have said more thah once since en- 
tering your State, I knew as no one knows by reading and by hear- 
ing people talk of all the resources that it had, but I could not fully 
realize them until I had seen them. Going through California, 
I have been struck with the prosperous and contented look of its 
people, and of course you are contented ; I should be ashamed of 
you if you were not (applause), living in such a State as this. 
And glad though I have been to see your soil and climate, to see 
your products, the products of your fields, and mines and woods, 
what you have done with railroads, with transportation companies 
on the water, with factories, with industries of every kind, what 
I have been most pleased with after all has been the way in which 
you are training the citizenship of the future, the attention paid to 
the schools of every grade here in this State ; and above all with 
the type of men and women and children whom it has been my 
good fortune to encounter. The essential thing in any State is 
the character of the average man or woman, and I am proud to 
be your fellow-citizen, and to have men the type of people I have 
met in California. (Cheers and applause.) 



[153] 



NOV 5 1903 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



017 137 689 



